Sarah Ostadabbas

Professor Ostadabbas is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Northeastern University (NEU), Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Professor Ostadabbas joined NEU in 2016 from Georgia Tech, where she was a post-doctoral researcher following completion of her PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2014. At NEU, Professor Ostadabbas is the director of the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab) with the goal of enhancing human information-processing capabilities through the design of adaptive interfaces via physical, physiological, and cognitive state estimation. These interfaces are based on rigorous models adaptively parameterized using machine learning and computer vision algorithms. For many of these interfaces, Professor Ostadabbas has developed augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools for both the assessment and enhancement portions of the project. Professor Ostadabbas’ work also expands to the Small Data Domain (e.g. medical or military applications), where data collection and/or labeling is expensive, individualized, and protected by very strong privacy or classification laws. Her solutions include learning frameworks with deep structures that work with limited labeled training samples, integrate domain-knowledge into the model for both prior learning and synthetic data augmentation, and maximize the generalization of learning across domains by learning invariant representations. Professor Ostadabbas is the co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and her research has been awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), including Pre-CAREER and CAREER awards, Department of Defense (DoD), Mathworks, Amazon AWS, Verizon, Oracle, Biogen, and NVIDIA. She co-organized the Multimodal Data Fusion (MMDF2018) workshop, an NSF PI mini-workshop on Deep Learning in Small Data, the CVPR workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures from 2019 and she was the program chair of the Machine Learning in Signal Processing (MLSP2019). Prof. Ostadabbas is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Sensors Letters and Digital Biomarkers Journal, and has been serving in several signal processing and machine learning conferences as a technical chair or session chair. She is a Senior IEEE member, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Women in Engineering, IEEE Signal Processing Society, IEEE EMBS, IEEE Young Professionals, International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation (ISVR), and ACM SIGCHI.