Applied Machine Learning

Janki Bhimani’s primary research focus revolves around Flash-Based Storage Systems, Big Data Processing, Cloud Computing, High-Performance Computing, and Parallel and Distributed Computing. Her research interest also includes Performance Modeling, Resource Management, and Capacity Planning for various emerging inter-disciplinary research domains. With her extraordinary expertise and extensive experience in the field of new emerging flash-based storage systems and devices, she has made significant contributions to the data storage management community. She is the recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Research Award of 2019 from Northeastern University. She also received Best Paper Awards from flagship conferences. Her work is published in highly selective conferences and journals. She is also the main inventor of top graded patents. Hand-in-hand with her research, she is very passionate about teaching and mentoring. Prior to joining at Florida International University, she previously served Northeastern University as an instructor. She also closely worked with research scientists at Samsung Semiconductor Research Labs towards evolving flash-based SSDs. In her free time, Janki is a creative visual artist. Far from home, amidst nature, she finds her inspiration to paint. She enjoys understanding the impact of art on human psychology, and she can painterly bring motivation, healing, and encouragement through the canvas.

Microbiome, GPU computing, Network Analysis

Dr. Trevor Cickovski received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2008. He holds Graduate Faculty status and specializes in teaching hardware and Unix coursework, and is IRB-certified and a member of the Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG) at FIU. He also is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and the National Learning Assistant Alliance (LAA). He has received funding from NIJ (epigenetics), and NSF (machine learning and Covid-19 vaccine discovery). Trevor is lead software developer of PluMA, facilitating natural progress by allowing construction of new ideas as plugins in a choice programming language.

Trevor is passionate about health and explores roles played the microbiome in maintaining homeostasis. Microbiomes have enormous influence given their ubiquity and involvement in host metabolic reactions. He has explored connections with ADHD, A1AD, COPD, smoking, and red tides using multi-omics approaches that integrate DNA, RNA and metabolites through large-scale processing, GPUs, and network analyses. He has several peer-reviewed publications including JMM, LNBI, Bioinformatics, BMC, ICCABS, IWBBIO, and ACM TCBB. He has received funding from NIJ (epigenetics), and NSF (machine learning and Covid-19 vaccine discovery). Trevor is lead software developer of PluMA, facilitating natural progress by allowing construction of new ideas as plugins in a choice programming language. These can be uniformly tested alongside other plugins and committed to a centralized plugin pool. The PluMA plugin pool has grown from 70 to 225+ plugins from 2019 to 2020, and continues to grow.

See more about Dr. Cickovski here: Trevor Cickovski’s Webpage (fiu.edu)

Robert Hacker is the Co-founder and Director of StartUP FIU, where he focuses on commercializing faculty research in emerging technologies and curriculum innovation. He is a professor in the Honors College at FIU and he previously taught at MIT Sloan. He teaches courses in social entrepreneurship, mental frameworks in decision making and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He previously was the COO/CFO of One Laptop per Child, an international social venture started at the MIT Media Lab. He also built a billion dollar publicly-traded company in Indonesia. He is the author of two books on entrepreneurship.

See more about Prof. Hacker here: Robert H. Hacker – StartUP FIU

Computational Sensor Networks, Parallel and Distributed Algorithms and Data Structures, Software for Detections of Critical Events, Autonomous Systems and Distributed Systems

Dr. S.S. Iyengar is currently the Distinguished University Professor, Ryder Professor of Computer Science and a former Director of the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), Miami. He is also the founding director of the Discovery Lab. Prior to joining FIU, Dr. Iyengar was the Roy Paul Daniel’s Distinguished Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science department for over 20 years at Lousiana State University. He has also worked as a visiting scientist at Oak Ridge National Lab, Jet Propulsion Lab, Satish Dhawan Professor at IISc and Homi Bhabha Professor at IGCAR, Kalpakkam and University of Paris and visited Tsinghua University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) etc. His research interests include High-Performance Algorithms, Biomedical Computing, Sensor Fusion, and Intelligent Systems for the last four decades. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI Program), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy / Oak Ridge National Laboratory (DOE/ORNL), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US Army Research Office (URO), and various state agencies and companies. He has served on the US National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health Panels to review proposals in various aspects of Computational Science and has been involved as an external evaluator (ABET-accreditation) for several Computer Science and Engineering Departments across the country and the world. Dr. Iyengar has also served as a research proposal evaluator for the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Iyengar is developing computational measures for predicting DNA mutations during cancer evolution, using wavelet analysis in cancer genome research, and designing smart biomarkers for bioremediation. His inventions have significantly impacted biomedical engineering and medicine. He recently patented a simple, low-cost device for early intervention in glaucoma, and was involved in early detection of lung cancer by developing a 4D motion model jointly with Southwestern Medical School.

See more about Dr. Iyengar here: Dr. S.S. Iyengar (fiu.edu)

Empirical system security and privacy, Malware Detection, Code Analysis, and Web and Browser Security

Dr. Amin Kharraz research focuses on building systems to facilitate a data-driven approach to security. The primary goal of Dr. Amin is to apply this methodology to rigorously analyze the behavior of online attacks and facilitate developing platforms to discover and mitigate these attacks in a scalable and reliable manner. The problems that Dr. Amin tackles often involve the intersection of society, technology, and security.

See more about Dr. Kharraz here: Amin Kharraz – Research in Systems Security

View Dr. Kharraz’s projects here: Prof. Amin Kharraz Projects

Dr. Agoritsa Polyzou is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU). Before joining FIU, she was a postdoctoral Fritz family fellow in the Massive Data Institute (MDI) of McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2020, and her Bachelor in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece. She is engaging in projects at the intersection of big data, machine learning, ethics, and fairness. Her research interests include data mining, recommender systems, the application of machine learning techniques within educational contexts, and the fairness concerns that arise from their use. Her goal is to help students succeed using data and machine learning models. At the same time, she is interested in ensuring that such models will be fair and responsible.

Aquatic Robots, Persistent Ocean Monitoring, Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Gregory Murad Reis received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Florida International University in 2018, and his Master’s degree in Systems Engineering and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Federal University of Lavras, Brazil, in 2014 and 2012, respectively.

He completed his Ph.D. as a Science without Borders fellow, sponsored by federal agencies NSF, ONR, CAPES, and LASPAU (Harvard University).

With 19 years of experience in teaching, Dr. Reis has taught Mathematics and Computer Science courses for several undergraduate programs and schools. Moreover, he has experience in early, elderly and special education. In his career, Gregory has mentored over fifty students, including high school teachers and undergraduate and master’s students in several programs, such as Science without Borders’s Summer Research Program, NSF’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and NSF’s Research Experience for Teachers (RET).

Gregory has published several papers in conferences and journals. His current research interests are centered on the challenges of marine robotics and STEM Education. Key problems he has addressed so far include localization and navigation of aquatic robots in GPS-denied environments, analysis of the spatiotemporal dynamics of the ocean, and the development of new technologies for environmental monitoring.

Gregory has also served as the Robotics Coach for the Ultimate Software Academy for Computer Science Education for over 4 years, teaching professional development courses in robotics and coding for K-12 teachers in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS). He is currently transforming the K-12 curriculum by including project-based robotics activities and competitions.

See more about Dr. Reis here: Gregory Reis

View Dr. Reis’ projects here: Prof. Gregory Murad Reis Projects

Geographic Information Systems, Database Management, Health Informatics

Dr. Rishe has authored 6 books and edited 7 books on database management, location-based data, health informatics, and high performance computing. He is the inventor of 8 U.S. patents on database querying, semantic database performance, Internet data extraction, and computer medicine. Rishe has authored 300 papers in journals and proceedings on databases, software engineering, Geographic Information Systems, Internet, and life sciences. He was awarded over $55 million in research grants by Government and Industry, including NSF, NASA, IBM, DoI, DHS, USGS. Rishe is the Founder and Director of the High-Performance Database Research Center at FIU (HPDRC) and of the NSF International FIU-FAU-Dubna-Greenwich Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Knowledge Enablement (I/UCRC). Rishe is the inaugural FIU Outstanding University Professor and Eminent Chair Professor in Computer Science.

See more about Dr. Rishe here: Dr. Naphtali David Rishe (fiu.edu)

Applied Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Network Security and Wireless Networking

Dr. Mo Sha is an Associate Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU). Before joining FIU, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton University – State University of New York. His research interests include wireless networking, Internet of Things, applied machine learning, network security, and cyber-physical systems. He published more than 50 research papers, served on the technical program committees of 16 premier conferences, and reviewed paper for 21 journals. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2021, the NSF CRII award in 2017, and the Educator of the Year in Computer Science award and the Career Champion award at Binghamton University in 2018. He is a senior member of IEEE, a senior and lifetime member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi.

See more about Dr.Sha here: Mo Sha’s Homepage (fiu.edu)

View Dr.Sha projects here: Prof. Mo Sha Projects

Artificial Intelligence, Big data, Cyber Analytics/Visualization, Malware Analysis and Blockchain

Dr. Himanshu Upadhyay is serving Florida International University’s Applied Research Center as Principal Scientist for the past 18 years, overseeing the Applied Artificial Intelligence / Cybersecurity / IT research group. He is also an adjunct professor in the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering teaching Applied Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity courses.

See more about Dr.Upadhyay here: Himanshu Upadhyay (fiu.edu)