Waleed Meleis

About

Waleed Meleis received the BSE degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1990, and the MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1992 and 1996. In 1996 he joined the Computer Engineering Group of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Prof. Meleis served as Associate Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2016 to 2019, as Interim Associate Dean for Graduate Education from 2019-2020, as Associate Dean for Graduate Education from 2020-2022, as Interim Vice Provost and Academic Lead – Oakland from 2023 to 2024, and has served as Vice Provost for Graduate Education since January 2023.

As Associate Dean, Prof. Meleis oversaw graduate recruitment, admissions, advising, academic operations, online instruction, and PhD student development for the College of Engineering’s 57 certificate, master’s, and PhD programs. Under his leadership, graduate enrollment increased 39% and the fraction of PhD admissions offers with guaranteed five-year funding increased to more than 95%. The College introduced ten new graduate programs, certificates, and concentrations, including new collaborations with other colleges, and more than 500 new PlusOne pathways. The College also deployed six programs to our campuses in Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, and Portland.

As Interim Vice Provost and Academic Lead for the Oakland campus, Prof. Meleis supported our academic offerings and research activities. He worked with the leadership team of the campus, Mills College at Northeastern and other academic colleges, and support units across the university to ensure that research, educational programming, and associated academic functions operated effectively on the Oakland campus. Prof. Meleis is currently serving as Vice Provost for Graduate Education where he works to provide graduate students with an outstanding academic experience across our colleges and campuses, increase the quality and sustainability of our graduate programs, and serve as the Provost’s Office’s academic point of contact for the development and management of graduate programs.

Prof. Meleis founded and advises Enabling Engineering, an innovative engineering student group that designs and builds devices to empower individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities. Participating students collaborate with clients on projects that provide greater independence, reduce medical burdens, and increase social connectedness. The group helps family members, clinicians, and teachers care for people with disabilities. By giving students the opportunity to participate in Enabling Engineering projects, the group is training the next generation of engineers to be knowledgeable about, and aware of, the needs of individuals with disabilities. The group has given more than 700 students from across the university the chance to work on 60 practice-oriented projects with clinical collaborators and community partners. The group is self-supporting, having received more than $350K in external funding. Enabling Engineering projects have been profiled by CNN, Engadget, Forbes, PC World, and Herald News.

Prof. Meleis has been leading an innovative, interdisciplinary Dialogue of Civilizations trip to Italy and the UK on Scientific Revolutions since 2015. The goal of the Dialogue is to understand two revolutions in scientific thought, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the Computational Revolution of the 20th century. The courses trace the evolution of science starting in ancient times, makes connections to the local environment, and then discusses practical implications of these ideas for modern scientists

Selected Publications

• W. Li, W. Meleis, Adaptive Adjacency Kanerva Coding for Memory- Constrained Reinforcement Learning, In International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition (MLDM), Springer, New York, 2018
• D. Levac, H. Dumas, W. Meleis, Development and Preliminary Usability Evaluation of a Tablet-Based Interactive Movement Tool for Pediatric Rehabilitation, JMIR Rehabilitation Assistive Technologies 25(2), 2018, e1030
• W. Li, F. Zhou, K. Chowdhury, W. Meleis, QTCP: Adaptive Congestion Control with Reinforcement Learning, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, 2018, 1-1
• W. Li, F. Zhou, W. Meleis, K. Chowdhury Dynamic Generalization Kanerva Coding in Reinforcement Learning for TCP Congestion Control Design, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2017
• J. Radford, A. Pilny, A. Reichelmann, B. Keegan, B. Welles, J. Hoye, K. Ognyanova, W. Meleis, D. Lazer, Volunteer Science: An Online Laboratory for Experiments in Social Psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly, 79(4), 2016

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