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 associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She joined NU in 2016 after completing her post-doctoral research at Georgia Tech, following the achievement of her PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2014. At NU, Professor Ostadabbas holds the roles of Director at the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab), Director of Women in Engineering (WIE), and Co-Director at The Center for Signal Processing, Imaging, Reasoning, and Learning (SPIRAL). Her research focuses on the convergence of computer vision and machine learning, particularly emphasizing representation learning in visual perception problems. In her applied research, she has significantly contributed to the understanding, detection, and prediction of human and animal behaviors through the modeling of visual motion, considering various biomechanical factors. Professor Ostadabbas also extends her work to the Small Data Domain, including applications in medical and military fields, where data collection and labeling are costly and protected by strict privacy laws. Her solutions involve deep learning frameworks that operate effectively with limited labeled training data, incorporate domain knowledge for prior learning and synthetic data augmentation, and enhance the generalization of learning across domains by acquiring invariant representations. Professor Ostadabbas has co-authored over 130 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and received research awards from prestigious institutions such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense (DoD), Sony, Mathworks, Amazon AWS, Verizon, Oracle, Biogen, and NVIDIA. She has been honored with the NSF CAREER Award (2022), Sony Faculty Innovation Award (2023), was the runner-up for the Oracle Excellence Award (2023), and One of the 120+ Women Spearheading Advances in Visual Tech and AI Recognized by LDV Capital (2024). She served in the organization committees of many workshops in renowned conferences (such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICIP, ICCASP, BioCAS, CHASE, ICHI) in various roles including Lead/Co-Lead Organizer, Program Chair, Board Member, Publicity Co-Chair, Session Chair, Technical Committee, and Mentor.

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

Bishoy Galoaa headshot

Students

May 27, 2025

From Financial Analyst to AI Researcher as an MS Student

Bishoy Galoaa, MS’25, electrical and computer engineering, is pursuing his passion of making a meaningful impact with artificial intelligence through academic research at Northeastern, machine learning at Massachusetts General Hospital, and now as a PhD student.

Sarah Ostadabbas

Faculty

Apr 30, 2025

Patent for 3D Human Pose Estimation System

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas was awarded a patent for “3D human pose estimation system.”

Sarah Ostadabbas

Faculty

Feb 19, 2025

Patent for Contactless In-Bed Pressure Estimation

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas was awarded a patent for “Method and system for in-bed contact pressure estimation via contactless imaging.”

Faculty

Jan 30, 2025

Faculty and Staff Awards 2025

Faculty and staff were recognized at the 27th Annual College of Engineering Faculty and Staff Awards for their exceptional service and dedication in support of students, the COE community, and the university during the 2024-2025 academic year.

Faculty

Oct 01, 2024

Patent for Color-Sensing Technology

ChE Affiliated Faculty Swastik Kar and ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas were awarded a patent for “Device and method for color indentification.”

Sarah Ostadabbas

Faculty

Oct 01, 2024

Ostadabbas Wins 2024 Cade Prize for Inventivity

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas received the 2024 Cade Prize for Inventivity in the technology category for AiWover, a groundbreaking spin-off from her lab that uses AI to transform visual monitoring of babies and toddlers and enhances both safety and developmental tracking.

Sarah Ostadabbas

Faculty

Aug 29, 2024

Creating Age-Inclusive VR

ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas,  in collaboration with the University of Rhode Island, was awarded a $600,000 NSF grant for “Graph-Centric Exploration of Nonlinear Neural Dynamics in Visuospatial-Motor Functions During Immersive Human-Computer Interactions.” She is investigating how aging impacts the ability to use emerging HCI technologies.

Faculty

Jul 08, 2024

Using AI To Save Lives on the Battlefield

Liam McEneaney, MS’25, engineering and public policy, is working with ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas and MIE Teaching Professor Beverly Kris Jaeger-Helton, and in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Lab, to develop an AI-powered computer program that will accurately and quickly fill out tactical combat casualty care cards for injured soldiers on its own on the battlefield by processing video and audio from medics in real time, and quickly sending the digital card to hospital staff. 

Faculty

May 20, 2024

ECE Professors Recognized Among Leading Women in Visual Tech and AI

ECE Professor Octavia Camps and ECE Associate Professor Sarah Ostadabbas were recognized by LDV Capital as two of the 120+ Women Spearheading Advances in Visual Tech and AI, which highlights contributions of women in fields such as machine vision, pattern recognition, and generative models.

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.

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