Sarah Ostadabbas
Core Faculty
Professor Ostadabbas is a core faculty member at the Institute for Experiential AI and 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 120 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), and was the runner-up for the Oracle Excellence Award (2023). In 2024, she was recognized by LDV Capital in their feature, "120+ Women Spearheading Advances in Visual Tech and AI." Professor Ostadabbas holds Senior Membership in IEEE and is actively involved in 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. Professor Ostadabbas has played key roles in the organization committees of numerous workshops at renowned conferences, including CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, WACV, ICIP, ICCASP, BioCAS, CHASE, and ICHI, serving as Lead/Co-Lead Organizer, Program Chair, Board Member, Publicity Co-Chair, Session Chair, Technical Committee Member, and Mentor.
Current Postdoc: Somaieh Amraee