Sarah Ostadabbas

Associate Professor,  Electrical and Computer Engineering
Director,  Women in Engineering Program

Contact

Social Media

Office

  • 520 ISEC
  • 617.373.4992

Research Focus

Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Augmented Cognition with Medical Applications; Augmented/Virtual Reality

About

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 70 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, 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 member of IEEE, 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.

Education

  • Postdoc (2015)—Georgia Tech
  • PhD (2014) Electrical & Computer Engineering (Signal Processing)—UT Dallas
  • MS (2007) Electrical Engineering (Control)—Sharif University of Tech, Tehran, Iran
  • BS (2006) Electrical Engineering (Electronics)—Amirkabir University of Tech, Tehran, Iran
  • BS (2005) Electrical Engineering (Biomedical)—Amirkabir University of Tech, Tehran, Iran

Professional Affiliations

  • Member of IEEE
  • IEEE Women in Engineering
  • IEEE Signal Processing Society
  • IEEE EMBS
  • IEEE Young Professionals
  • ACM SIGCHI​.

Research Overview

Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Augmented Cognition with Medical Applications; Augmented/Virtual Reality

Augmented Cognition Laboratory

ACLab works at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning. We are interested in representation learning algorithms for visual perception (object recognition, localization, segmentation, pose estimation, activity tracking, …) with the multidisciplinary goal of understanding, detecting, and predicting human behaviors by estimating their physical, physiological and emotional states. For a robust and efficient state estimation, we represent the state of the world in a low-dimensional embedding, called “pose”, which is a succinct interpretable representation of the important information in the state. At ACLab, we use machine intelligence (mainly Computer Vision and Machine Learning) to solve these pose estimation problems and to give human leverage, not to replace them! At ACLab, we are also working on problems in Small Data domains. To deal with data limitation, we do integrate explicit (structural or data-driven) domain knowledge into the learning process via generative models, while benefiting from the recent advancements in data efficient ML.

Augmented Cognition Laboratory

Selected Research Projects

Selected Publications

Students

Feb 21, 2024

Engineers Week Women in Engineering Panel Discusses Unique Challenges Facing Women in Engineering

During Engineers Week, a panel of faculty and students shared their experiences and advice on their education and career journeys as women engineers. They offered advice to future female engineers to empower them and help them grow, including the importance of faculty and peer mentors.

Sarah Ostadabbas

Faculty

Nov 28, 2023

Ostadabbas Receives an NSF PFI Grant to Integrate AR Technologies into Stroke Rehabilitation

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh and Myomo, Inc., has secured a $550K NSF grant for their project titled “PFI-RP: Augmented Reality and Electroencephalography for Detecting, Assessing, and Rehabilitating Visual Unilateral Neglect in Stroke Patients.” This project aims to create a comprehensive tool for detecting, assessing, and rehabilitating neglect in stroke patients.

Students

Nov 14, 2023

MS to PhD Research Path Leads to Improving Autonomous Vehicle Performance

Xiangyu Bai, MS’23, electrical and computer engineering, who is now pursuing his PhD at Northeastern in computer engineering, conducts research in the area of computer vision focused on improving autonomy simulations. He is advised by Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas and works in her Augmented Cognition Laboratory.

Sarah Ostadabbas

Faculty

Oct 09, 2023

Ostadabbas Receives Sony Faculty Innovation Award

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas received the Sony Faculty Innovation Award for her project titled “Live Stream Temporally Embedded 3D Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation.” She is the first at Northeastern to receive this prestigious award.

Faculty

Sep 15, 2023

Ostadabbas Selected as a Finalist of the Eureka Award of the 2023 Oracle Excellence Award

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas was selected as one of the finalists of the Eureka Award of the 2023 Oracle Excellence Awards. With Oracle for Research, researchers in academic, commercial, and governmental settings, across all disciplines, are exploring novel ways to achieve ground-breaking results to make the world a better place.

Faculty

Sep 05, 2023

Developing New Technology for Social Anxiety Treatment

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas is leading a $500,000 NSF grant, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, for the “Development of a Precision Closed Loop BCI for Socially Fearful Teens with Depression and Anxiety” to introduce a prototype for clinical application of augmented reality (AR)-guided, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based exposure technology for socially fearful teens.

Faculty

Aug 07, 2023

Young Scholars Program for Local High School Students Finishes Strong

High school seniors engage in diverse engineering research during Northeastern’s Young Scholars Program, mentored by COE faculty and students.

Faculty

Aug 07, 2023

Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU Pathways) completes 10 week Boston program

MIE Professor Ibrahim Zeid and STEM Executive Director Claire Duggan led a 10-week NSF-funded REU program called “REU Pathways,” which mentors community college students in engineering research.

Faculty

Mar 01, 2023

Celebrating National Engineers Week 2023

The College of Engineering celebrated National Engineers Week with events including a ‘Break the Mold’ Fireside Chat with award-winning engineer and commentator Dr. Shini Somara and Dean Gregory Abowd; Cookies with the Dean event, which included snacks, photo and video booths, COE swag and a lot of COE pride; Breakout sessions with Shini Somara with select students and faculty showing our progressive engineering program, research, and community; and an Engineering for Everyone Expo hosted by the Center for STEM Education.

Faculty

Feb 02, 2023

2023 Acorn Innovation Awards

ECE Assistant Professor Sarah Ostadabbas, Professor Deniz Erdogmus, and MIE Associate Professor Yi Zheng received MassVentures Acorn Innovation Awards to assist them in testing the viability of their technologies and potentially bringing their research to market.

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