Sarah Ostadabbas

Associate Professor

Professor Ostadabbas is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Northeastern University (NU), 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 NU, Professor Ostadabbas is the director of the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab) and the Co-Director of The Center for Signal Processing, Imaging, Reasoning, and Learning (SPIRAL). Her research interests are at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning, with particular focus on the representation learning in visual perception problems. On the applied side of research, her work has primarily contributed to understanding, detecting, and predicting human behaviors by estimating their physical, physiological and emotional states. For many of these state estimation problems, 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 100 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, Oracle, Biogen, and NVIDIA. Professor Ostadabbas is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of the 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. 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.

  • Postdoc (2015) Electrical & Computer Engineering —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