🏆 Grants & Awards

🎖️ NSF CISE CRII Grant – $167,500 - Sole PI

Awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant as the sole Principal Investigator. Thanks to NSF!

📄 Publications from this Project Grant:
A total of 5 papers have been accepted/published, including:

• 🧠 CVPR 2025 — 2 papers

• 🌐 ICDCS 2024 — 1 paper

• 💻 COMPSAC 2024 — 1 paper

• 📡 IEEE Consumer Electronics — 1 paper

🎖️ Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award (2024) 

Truly honored to receive the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award (2024) from the School of Computing at Southern Illinois University.

Grateful to my students, colleagues, and the entire SIU community for their support on this incredible journey. 💡📚✨

🏅 FIU 2022 Real Triumphs Graduate Award

I am incredibly honored to have received the highly prestigious 2022 Real Triumphs Graduate Award from Florida International University (FIU). 🌟 

🎥 Watch on YouTube | 🎖️ View Award

Each commencement, FIU recognizes a select group of graduates whose journey embodies exceptional academic excellence, professional promise, and personal resilience. Being chosen for this distinction is a profound honor and a reflection of the dedication and passion that fueled my time at FIU. 

📸 A proud and memorable moment shared with my incredible advisor, Prof. M. Hadi Amini — grateful for the guidance, inspiration, and unwavering support throughout this journey! 🙌🎓

🏅 Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate Award

Honored to be recognized with the University-Wide Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate Award—a distinction presented to only one master's graduate during the induction ceremony, in recognition of exemplary academic excellence, impactful research, and dedicated service to the department, school, and broader community.

📸 Proud moment shared with Prof. Jason Liu, Interim Director of Computer Science at FIU!

🏅 Best Paper Award – CSCI 2019

Received the Best Paper Award at CSCI 2019 for our work on distributed IoT sensing and federated learning. In this research, we developed a distributed IoT sensing framework and explored how it can effectively enhance federated learning algorithms by improving efficiency, scalability, and data privacy.