Physical and Spatial AI

Dr. Stephen Crago holds a joint appointment as a Research Associate Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and as the Deputy Director of Computational Systems and Technology (CS&T) at the Information Sciences Institute, where he has been since 1997. As Deputy Director of CS&T, Dr. Crago has primary responsibility for CS&T’s Arlington contingent in Arlington, Virginia, and has managerial responsibilities in reconfigurable computing and wireless in addition to his own group’s research in high-performance cloud and multi-core software. Since joining ISI, Dr. Crago’s research has been sponsored by DARPA, NASA, ONR and other government agencies, and Dr. Crago has led many projects, from small, focused research efforts to large multi-disciplinary collaborations, across the range of his research interests. He received his B.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Dr. Jyotirmov Deshmukh joined the Department of Computer Science as a new faculty in August 2017. He transitioned to his role as an educator after five years of work as a Principal Research Engineer at Toyota Motors North America R&D. At Toyota, he helped bridge the gap between academic research and industrial practice through requirement engineering and testing methods. Before joining Toyota, he was the 2010 Computing Innovation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania under the mentorship of Rajeev Alur. He got his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, where he was advised by E. Allen Emerson. His current research interests include the application of formal methods to reason about cyber-physical systems, verification and testing of embedded control systems, real-time temporal logics, and analysing time-series data. He is particularly interested in studying cyber-physical systems that use machine learning based components, such as autonomous driving vehicles.

Dr. Assad Oberai is the Hughes Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in the Viterbi School of Engineering. He earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Osmania University (1992), an MS from the University of Colorado (1994), and a PhD from Stanford University (1998) all in Mechanical Engineering.  He has held academic appointments at Boston University (2001-2005), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, 2006 -2017) and the University of Southern California (USC, 2018-now) At RPI, he was the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Engineering, and the Associate Director of the Scientific Computation Research Center. At USC, he was the interim Vice Dean for Research in the Viterbi School of Engineering from 2019 to 2021.

Dr. Oberai leads the Computation and Data Driven Discovery (CD3) group which designs, implements and applies data- and physics-based models and algorithms to solve problems in engineering and science. Problems such as better detection, diagnosis and care of diseases like cancer, understanding the role of mechanics and physics in medicine and biology, modeling the evolution of multi-physics and multiscale systems, and reduced-order models for aerospace and mechanical systems. He has authored more than 140 articles in archival journals on these topics. He is on the board of academic editors for three journals.

Dr. Oberai is a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics (2023), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, 2020), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE, 2016), and the United States Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM, 2015).  In 2015, he was awarded the Research Excellence Award by the School of Engineering at Rensselaer. He received the Humboldt Foundation Award for experienced researchers in 2009, and the Erasmus Mundus Master Course Lectureship at Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Barcelona in 2010. He was awarded the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award for his contributions to Applied Mechanics by the ASME in 2007. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career award in 2005 and the Department of Energy Early Career award in 2004. 

Dr. Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Spatial Sciences, and the chair of the Computer Science Department. He is also the Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) and the Informatics Program at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. He was the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012. Since then, he founded another company, ClearPath (recently rebranded as TallyGo), focusing on predictive path-planning for car navigation systems. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than three hundred research papers in databases, GIS and multimedia with more than 12 US Patents.

Dr. Shahabi has received funding from several agencies such as NSF, NIJ, NASA, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, and DHS as well as several industries such as Chevron, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NCR, NGC and Oracle. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010-2013 and VLDB Journal from 2009-2015. He is currently the chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2017-2020 term and also on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He is the founding chair of IEEE NetDB workshop and also the general co-chair of SSTD’15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008 and 2009. He chaired the nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2011-2014 terms. He is a PC co-Chair of APWeb+WAIM’2017 and the PhD workshop of ICDE 2018. In the past, he has been PC co-chair of several conferences such as BigComp’2016, MDM’2016, DASFAA 2015, IEEE MDM 2013 and IEEE BigData 2013, and regularly serves on the program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, and ACM Multimedia.

Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award in 2009, the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for Information and Telecommunications. He was also a recipient of the US Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering “Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering” program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the 2005 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” program.

Dr. Gaurav S. Sukhatme is Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and an Amazon Scholar. He is the Director of the USC School of Advanced Computing and the Executive Vice Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He holds the Donald M. Aldstadt Chair in Advanced Computing at USC. He was the Chairman of the USC Computer Science department from 2012-17. He received his undergraduate education in computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from USC.

Sukhatme is the co-director of the USC Robotics Research Laboratory and the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory director. His research interests are in networked robots, learning robots, and field robotics. He has published extensively in these and related areas. Sukhatme has served as PI on numerous NSF, DARPA, and NASA grants. He was a Co-PI on the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, AAAI, and the IEEE, a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Okawa Foundation research award, and an Amazon research award. He is one of the founders of the Robotics: Science and Systems conference. He was the program chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Autonomous Robots (Springer Nature) and has served in the past as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing.