Francesco Restuccia
Associate Professor,
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Office
- 670B EXP
- 617.373.3655
Research Focus
Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks, Cyber-Physical Systems
About
Dr. Restuccia’s research creates the foundations and systems needed to answer the following question:
How can a distributed intelligent system sense, communicate and safely decide when its data, models and environment are fundamentally uncertain and physical resources are strictly limited?
To address this question, Dr. Restuccia’s group rethinks sensing, communication, learning and hardware to be jointly designed around the decisions they support, the resources they consume, the environments in which they operate and the uncertainty that can — and cannot — be reduced.
Dr. Restuccia is the recipient of the PECASE Award, ARO Young Investigator Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, Mario Gerla Award in Computer Science and Søren Buus Outstanding Research Award from the College of Engineering.
He received three IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Awards and two IEEE WOWMOM Best Paper Awards. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM and serves in the TPC and editorial boards of several prestigious journals and conferences.
Honors & Awards
- 2026 PECASE Award (from DoD nomination)
- 2026 ARO Young Investigator Award
- 2026 IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award
- 2026 IEEE WOWMOM Best Paper Award
- 2025 DARPA Young Faculty Award
- 2025 IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award
- 2025 Søren Buus Outstanding Research Award
- 2023 AFOSR Young Investigator Award
- 2023 ONR Young Investigator Award
- 2022 IEEE WOWMOM Best Paper Award
- 2022 IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award
- 2021 Communications of the ACM Research Highlight
- 2020 ACM SIGMOBILE Research Highlight
- 2019 Mario Gerla Young Investigator Award
Professional Affiliations
- IEEE Senior Member
- ACM Senior Member
Research Overview
Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks, Cyber-Physical Systems
Selected Research Projects
- RADAR: Resource-Aware Dynamic Adaptation for Resilient DNNs in Low-SWaP Tactical Systems
- – Principal Investigator, DARPA
- Securing xApps in Open RANs with Reliable and Principled AI Red-Teaming
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Superconducting Deep Neural Networks at the Edge
- – Principal Investigator, DARPA
- FuSe: Deep Learning and Signal Processing using Silicon Photonics and Digital CMOS Circuits for Ultra-Wideband Spectrum Perception
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Resilient-by-Design Data-Driven NextG Open Radio Access Networks
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Assured Wireless Operations Through Dynamic Data-Driven Open Radio Access Systems
- – Principal Investigator, Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Polymorphic Wireless Computing for Ultra-Wideband 6G Spectrum Dominance
- – Principal Investigator, Office of Naval Research
- Collaborative Research: SWIFT: AI-based Sensing for Improved Resiliency via Spectral Adaptation with Lifelong Learning
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Self-Adaptive Interference-Avoiding Wireless Receiver Hardware through Real-Time Learning-Based Automatic Optimization of Power-Efficient Integrated Circuits
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- A Software-Defined Edge Infrastructure Testbed for Full-stack Data-Driven Wireless Network Applications
- – Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- RINGS: Internet of Things Resilience through Spectrum-Agile Circuits, Learning-Based Communications and Thermal Hardware Security
- – co-Principal Investigator, National Science Foundation
- Collaborative Research: NeTS: Small: Reliable Task Offloading in Mobile Autonomous Systems Through Semantic MU-MIMO Control
- – PI, National Science Foundation
- Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: RFDataFactory: Principled Dataset Generation, Sharing and Maintenance Tools for the Wireless Community
- – co-PI, National Science Foundation
Research Centers and Institutes
Department Research Areas
Selected Publications
Please visit this link to access Prof. Restuccia’s Google Scholar profile.
Sep 08, 2026
Patent for Robust Wi-Fi Environment Sensing Technology
ECE Associate Professor Francesco Restuccia was awarded a patent for “System and method for sensing an environment.”
Jun 01, 2026
Restuccia Receives Army Research Office Early Career Program Award to Study Next-Generation MIMO Networking
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia has received the Army Research Office Early Career Program Award to develop the scientific foundations of secure, scalable, and resilient multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) communications.
May 27, 2026
Patent for Next Generation Data Compression Technology for Faster Wireless Connections
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia was awarded a patent for “Beamforming in wireless networks via split computing.”
May 05, 2026
Groundbreaking Research on MIMO Wireless Networks
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia received the 2026 IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award for his research on “BANDWEAVE: Enhanced Channel Estimation in MIMO Networks with Multi-Band Fusion,” which highlights his groundbreaking research on MIMO wireless networks.
Mar 23, 2026
Trust the System: A Q M Sazzad Sayyed’s Mission to Make AI Safer
A Q M Sazzad Sayyed, PhD’27, is an electrical engineering researcher at Northeastern’s MENTIS Lab, where he works on making AI systems safer and more reliable—ensuring they can be trusted when deployed in the real world. His work on robustness, out-of-distribution detection, and data integrity positions him at the forefront of a challenge that will only grow more critical as AI becomes further embedded in everyday life.
Jan 20, 2026
From Hanoi to Boston: Toan Gian and AI Innovations
Toan Gian, PhD ’29, electrical and computer engineering, completed his bachelor’s in electrical and electronics engineering at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, then came straight to Northeastern to pursue his PhD. His academic journey continues to evolve while researching AI innovations at Mentis Lab at Northeastern.
Nov 25, 2025
Addressing Backdoor Attacks on Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN)
Research developed by the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things on “How to Poison an xApp: Dissecting Backdoor Attacks to Deep Reinforcement Learning in Open Radio Access Networks” was published in Computer Networks.
Sep 23, 2025
2025 Stanford University Annual Assessment of Author Citations
The following COE professors are among the top scientists worldwide selected by Stanford University representing the top 2% of the most-cited scientists with single-year impact in various disciplines. The selection is based on the top 100,000 by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above.
Sep 09, 2025
Restuccia Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award to Study Resilient AI in Autonomous Systems
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia received a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that will provide research funding for “RADAR: Resource-Aware Dynamic Adaptation for Resilient DNNs in Low-SWaP Tactical Systems.”
Aug 26, 2025
Patent for a Method to Improve Wireless Communication with AI
ECE Assistant Professor Francesco Restuccia and ECE William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia received a patent for “System for frequency sharing in open radio access networks using artificial intelligence.”