$2.8M NSF Grant Funds CCNY Project To Develop AI-Powered Diagnostics For Heart Disease

A City College of New York-led project utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologies to develop a low-cost, easy-to-use, and high-precision system for the early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease is the recipient of a four-year $2.8 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The Ohio State University-based, NSF-funded AI-EDGE Institute is partnering with The City College in the project entitled: “AI/ML-driven edge computing for cardiovascular disease diagnosis/mechanism study.”

“Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, so early diagnosis is of critical importance,” said Jie Wei, professor of computer science in CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering, and the project’s principal investigator.

However, since conventional medical tests and monitoring techniques are typically very expensive and require qualified trained personnel, they are not practical for at-home use. This makes the need of an inexpensive, handy and highly accurate system imperative.

“This project will develop an innovative sensing and learning system for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, which takes measurements from subjects by light-weight and safe multimodal sensors,” said Wei. “It will analyze the data via cutting-edge AI and ML technologies, and monitor various cardiovascular parameters in real-time with personalized learning technologies for guaranteed accuracy.”

He added that the success of the proposed research will leverage the interdisciplinary expertise of CCNY and the AI-EDGE institute of Ohio State Univ. on AI/ML edge computing, multimodal deep learning, medical computing, and computing-enabled disease mechanism study.

The overarching goal is an easy and affordable system that will have a high impact on cardiovascular disease diagnosis and demonstrate the powerful applications of AI/ML and edge computing techniques in medical sensing, healthcare, and basic scientific research of underlying molecular mechanisms of diseases. Wei pointed out that the findings and expertise gained from the project will significantly facilitate the dissemination of applications of AI/ML-enabled edge computing and distributed learning to the healthcare.

“This project will also assist in community building in the neighborhood surrounding CCNY by improving outreach to under-represented minority communities. Further, the interdisciplinary nature of the project will provide valuable training opportunities to City College students from diverse groups with cutting-edge AI/ML techniques and their applications to the bio-medical domain,” said Rosemarie Wesson, CCNY’s associate provost for research.

CCNY student involvement in the project will range from undergraduates to post-doctorates.

Wei’s co-principle investigators include faculty from both CCNY and Ohio State University:

• Bingmei Fu (Biomedical Engineering, Grove School);
• Nicholas Madamopoulos (Electrical Engineering, Grove School);
• Jun Yoshioka (CUNY School of Medicine at CCNY); and
• Yingbin Liang (Ohio State University).

Proposed CCNY Quantum Institute earns $5M NSF funding

The City College of New York is establishing a state-of-the-art quantum institute, funded by a five-year $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation [NSF], to advance quantum research. 

Conceptualized by City College physicist Alexander Khanikaev – recipient of the NSF's prestigious Special Creativity Award in 2021, and one of the most Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) worldwide in 2022 – The City College of New York Quantum Institute comprises leading experts in quantum at CCNY and scientific partners from Nokia Bell labs and the University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL/UCF). The latter’s Andrea Blanco-Redondo is co-principal investigator on the project. 

The CCNY experts and other co-PIs include:

• Roger Dorsinville, chair of electrical engineering in the Grove School of Engineering;
   
• Carlos Meriles, professor of physics in the Division of Science; and
   
• Vinod Menon, professor of physics.

The Institute also will include two quantum-dedicated faculty in electrical engineering and physics that will be hired with plans of expanding CCNY’s educational programs in quantum information sciences and applications. 

Khanikaev said the new program and the quality of its faculty would make CCNY one of the leading institutions in quantum research. 

Three Grove School faculty join $12 million Google cybersecurity research project

The City College of New York is a participant in a $12 million Google initiative to stimulate the cybersecurity ecosystem and establish New York City as the global leader in cybersecurity. CUNY, Columbia University, Cornell, and New York University are the other institutions involved in the Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program. 

Three faculty from The City College’s Grove School of Engineering -- Rosario Gennaro, Nelly Fazio (both computer science) and Samah Saeed(electrical engineering) are among the beneficiaries of the $12 million grant that will go towards cutting-edge research. In addition to their research they will help expand educational opportunities for students seeking advanced degrees in cybersecurity. 

The Google funding will support ~90 collaborative research projects by 2025 in areas where further research could encourage the development of more secure digital ecosystems and inspire innovation. The funding will also be used by the universities to help grow their cybersecurity degree programs, bolster the upcoming workforce and champion underrepresented groups in cybersecurity.

Speaking on this educational component, Gennaro, director of the Grove School’s Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software(CAISS), said: 

“The Google grant is designed to train the new generation of cybersecurity professionals, at all levels from engineers to researchers. This CUNY-wide grant will be used to support cybersecurity education at all the campuses, and in particular it will help us generate a common platform across CUNY to share curricula, projects, etc. across all the colleges. 

“Moreover, in cooperation with all the other New York City academic institutions that are part of the Google effort, we will build a city-wide ‘Research Experience for Undergraduates’ program, where undergraduates from all the NYC universities will be matched with mentors across all NYC campuses to work on research projects sponsored by Google.” 

Gennaro and Fazio are engaged in joint research. “We are going to work on building new and more efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs, which are tools used to protect privacy and integrity of computations performed over data which is distributed over networks,” said Gennaro. “The project spans various topics including new cryptographic schemes, resistance to quantum computing advances and application scenarios like verifying that large machine learning models have been trained correctly.” 

Saeed’s research entails identifying new methods for hiding information/gates in quantum circuits. 
“Insights from these analyses will inform the development of a lightweight security application to prevent illegal distribution of quantum circuits at low cost by leveraging information hiding,” said Saeed. “It will also explore how to co-design security and reliability features of the quantum architectures using advanced deep learning.”

One other goal of the Google support is to address diversity gaps in the cybersecurity industry by focusing on recruiting and developing workers from underrepresented groups.

“The Google Cyber NYC Institutional Research Program will further propel New York as a research leader in cybersecurity, alongside the work of preeminent city institutions like New York City Cyber Command,” said Phil Venables, Chief Information Security Office for Google Cloud. “At Google, we're committed to being bold and responsible stewards of emerging technology like AI, so we're working together with four of New York's leading institutions to make sure the city is prepared as the threat landscape continually shifts.”

Grove School Engineer Samah Saeed Is Beneficiary Of $4.6m DoE Grant To Advance Quantum Computing

City College of New York Computer engineer and scientist Samah M. Saeed is the co-recipient of a $4.6 million U.S. Department of Energy [DoE] grant to advance quantum computing. The funding is for her project, “Toward Efficient Quantum Algorithm Execution on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Hardware.”

An assistant professor of electrical engineering in CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering, Saeed will focus on resolving the issues currently affecting the development of quantum computing. The ultimate goal is to develop research and training programs to enable efficient and reliable executions of quantum algorithms on large-scale quantum computers.

“The future of computing is quantum, an emerging computing paradigm that will offer a computational speedup for critical applications,” said Saeed. “Near-term quantum computers, referred to as Noisy Intermediate-Scum (NISQ) computers, are expected to have a transformative impact on applications demanding intense computation, such as machine learning and physical and chemical simulations.“

While these computers are very promising, Saeed added, they are fragile and operate in the presence of errors. As a result, there is a gap between current and near-term quantum hardware capabilities and quantum algorithms, which should be addressed to exploit the power of quantum computers. Although error correction is the ultimate solution to suppress errors and enable the correct execution of quantum algorithms, they are infeasible for near-term quantum computers due to the massive number of physical qubits required to correct errors.

Other objectives of Saeed’s project include:

• To build a theoretical foundation of quantum noise modeling and its impact on quantum circuit design;
• To develop a robust and scalable software package for error mitigation that requires minimum interaction with quantum computers and noise-aware quantum circuit optimization methods; and
• To build the next generation of quantum computing experts and increasing both the capacity and quality of traditionally underrepresented minorities (URM) participation in quantum computing.

In addition, it will build a strong foundation in quantum information science and quantum computing at CCNY through collaboration with the co-PI from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The project will provide an extensive two-pronged training program involving onsite training at the CCNY open to the entire college community to increase participation of underrepresented groups in the quantum computing workforce and summer research at LBNL. The idea is to enable interaction with a broader team of quantum-focused researchers with a diverse background including physics, computer science, and applied mathematics at LBNL.

Grove School team is #1 in US & Canada at international hardware security competition

A three-member team from The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering emerged US-Canada region winners in New York University’s global CSAW ’22 AI vs. Humans Challenge at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. The Grove team comprised electrical engineering (EE) PhD candidate Vedika Saravanan, EE PhD student Mohammad Walid Charrwi; and computer engineering graduate student Facundo Aguirre. Samah M. Saeed, assistant professor, electrical engineering, was the faculty advisor. 

Making its debut in the CSAW games, CCNY was nominated to the final phase where it competed against the University of Calgary (Canada) and University of Florida. “This is the most comprehensive student-run cyber security event in the world and we were competing against top teams from the United States and Canada region,” said Saeed. 

AI vs. Humans is a hardware security challenge contest co-located with CSAW 2022 for defeating artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools developed for hardware security. In the competition, participants can play the role of a defender, attacker, or both. The objective for the attacker is to inject stealthy hardware Trojans that evade state-of-the-art AI-based detection tools. For the defender, the objective is to generate test patterns that detect our AI-generated Trojans.

Participants are encouraged to use tools and techniques of their choice, such as heuristic-based, simulation-based, or even formal tools. In addition, they can be affiliated with either industry or academia.

The competition is designed to mimic real-world scenarios where an attacker can inject Trojans to cause damaging consequences ranging from altering the chip's functionality and leaking sensitive data, such as cryptographic keys, to causing denial-of-service attacks. 

The CSAW games are the brainchild of computer scientist Nasir Memon, currently a professor and vice dean for student and academic affairs at NYU. What he founded as a small contest called Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) 20 years ago, has grown to become the most comprehensive set of cybersecurity challenges by and for students around the globe.

Electrical Engineering Professor M. Umit Uyar receives U.S. Army funding for drone research

M. Ümit Uyar, Professor of Electrical Engineering, has recently received a $1.2 million in funding from the U.S. ARMY to further his research aimed at designing autonomous drone flight and task control by artificial intelligence and game theory based algorithms that would not require preplanned mission directives and allow for real-time response to unpredictable changes in theatre.

A team led by computer engineering professor Umit Uyar of The City College of the City University of New York is working to design such drones, referred to as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, which work as a swarm to collectively accomplish complex tasks that cannot be done by any individual one.

With a previous grant from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, organized by the MSI STEM Research Development Consortium, Uyar and colleagues have taken the first steps towards programming artificial intelligence into UAVs that allows the UAVs to react quickly, usually within milliseconds. Uyar and Janusz Kusyk, a professor and artificial intelligence and game theory specialist at the New York City College of Technology, are working together to use game theory to program the UAVs. Game theory, popularized by the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind” about the economist John Nash, calls for each interacting party to act in its own best interests by taking into account what others will do.

Electrical Engineering Professor receives National Science Foundation grant for his research

Professor Sang-Woo Seo’s research is on theoretical analysis of photonic devices and systems; nano/micro fabrication and processing; three-dimensional photonic integration/packaging; optical MEMs for biological applications; integrated microsystems using RF, bioMEMs, and photonics; integrated microfluidics, and flexible photonics devices for sensors and display.

He is a recent recipient of an NSF grant ($349,000) on light-induced liquid flow control for biomimetic retinal implants and therapies.

Neurotransmitter-based chemical stimulation is a relatively new concept and has demonstrated its potential to mimic neural information processes and bypass damaged neural synaptic interfaces.

However, most of the current efforts rely on limited cell numbers and their responses because of the lack of appropriate methods to investigate larger arrayed cell populations. Based on light-induced liquid flow control, the project will explore a novel three-dimensional microfluidic platform to address the fundamental limitations of the current chemical stimulation approach when it is applied to highly interconnected, large-arrayed neural stimulation.

Electrical Engineering Professor Alexander Khanikaev recipient of a Special Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation

Professor Alexander Khanikaev is the recipient of a Special Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research.  The award extends Dr. Khanikaev’s current grant “Novel Aspects of Topological Photonics in Open Optical Systems: Non-Hermiticity and Fano-Resonances” by two additional years ($300,000).  This award is in recognition of excellence in research, productivity, and impact on topologically nontrivial photonic systems and nonlinear photonic nanostructures and plasmonic metamaterials, as well as the broader impacts emanating from his NSF project.

The NSF Special Creativity award from the Division of Materials Research (DMR) is designed to recognize its most creative investigators who are attacking research problems at the forefront of their fields. Recipients of the award receive an automatic two-year extension on their NSF grant in which the award-winning research was performed and freedom to work on research topics of their choosing during the period of the extension.

Dr. Khanikaev is also the recent recipient of an Office of Naval Research $1,017,000 four year research grant in Topological Polaritonics.

Professor Alexander Khanikaev, was elected as a 2021 Fellow Member of The Optical Society in recognition of his pioneering contributions to topological photonics and novel photonic materials.

In a recent article in Advanced Materials, titled “ Near‐Field Characterization of Higher‐Order Topological Photonic States at Optical Frequencies” Dr. Khanikaev and his team applied a near-field technique to investigate a higher-order topological photonic metasurface. They show that the near-field profiles reveal the topological nature of optical modes (depicted as a torus in the picture). Topology manifests in the displacement of the Wannier center, giving rise to the topological dipole polarization and emergence of the topological boundary states observed in the optical near-field.