2024 News
- An open access book on “Bayesian Filter Design for Computational Medicine: A State-Space Estimation Framework” authored by Dilranjan S. Wickramasuriya and Rose T. Faghih will be published by Springer in April, 2024.
- Rose was elected as an IEEE EMBS Administrative Committee (AdCom) Technical Representative, starting in 2024.
- In January 2024, Rose was selected for the Second U.S.-Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium which brings together outstanding young scientists, engineers, and medical professionals from the United States and the member countries of the African Union for a series of symposia to discuss exciting advances and opportunities in their fields.
- Publications: A journal paper by CML students Saman Khazaei, Md. Rafiul Amin and Maryam Tahir with Rose as senior author on “Bayesian Inference of Hidden Cognitive Performance and Arousal States in Presence of Music” was published by IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology. Another paper co-authored by Samiul Alam and Saman with Rose as senior author on “Unveiling Productivity: The Interplay of Cognitive Arousal and Expressive Typing in Remote Work” was accepted by PLOS ONE.
- Rose is PI of the Early Stage NYU Discovery Research Fund for Human Health Award intended “to generate transformative, high-impact research on critical issues facing the world.” The proposed work titled “Multimodal Dynamic Biosensing for Quantification of Long COVID Symptom Progression” is multidisciplinary and involves co-PIs in NYU Langone Health
– Dr. Susan Malone (NYU Rory Meyers School of Nursing)
– Dr. Bradley Aouizerat (NYU School of Dentistry) and
– Dr. Stuart Katz (NYU Grossman School of Medicine).
- Rose is co-PI (PI: Yi Fang) on a $50,000 grant to organize the NYUAD Institute Dean Symposium: The First International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Innovations
2023 News
Rose Received an NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award for Early Stage Investigators
This $1,825,840 five-year grant awarded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) on “MESH: Multimodal Estimators for Sensing Health“ aims to track four important indicators of health: inflammation, metabolism, fatigue and interoceptive awareness using biochemical signals such as hormones and cytokines, and eye motion data for biomarker identification in health, disease and during emotional experiences. Read more in NYU News
MINDWATCH: Regulation of Brain Cognitive Arousal and Performance States through Auditory, Gustatory, and Olfactory Stimulation with Wearable Monitoring
CML graduate students and Rose published a research article outlining the influence of everyday activities such as listening to music, drinking coffee and use of perfume in Scientific Reports. This work is a key demonstration of utilizing commonly available interventions to regulate cognitive states such as performance and arousal. The first author is Rose’s former Ph.D. student Hamid Fekri Azgomi who is now a postdoctoral scholar in neurological surgery at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. This work has received attention from several international media outlets around the world including: Yahoo News, EurekAlert!, The Independent, The Mirage, News Medical Life Science, SciTechDaily, Science Daily, and Medical Xpress. Read the Scientific Reports article
Fall 2023 NYU Tandon News Spotlight of CML Since Moving to NYU
NYU Tandon News reports: “Conventional wisdom holds that moving a research lab to a new university involves a steep learning curve and requires plenty of time to get acclimated. But when Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Rose Faghih — already the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and an entrant on numerous lists of the most promising, young engineers in the world — arrived at NYU Tandon last year, she quickly set up her multidisciplinary Computational Medicine Lab, which is focused on designing control, optimization, estimation, and signal processing algorithms for biomedical and neural engineering applications, …” Read more in NYU News
The Computational Medicine Lab Won the First Place in the 2023 NYU Tandon Research Excellence Exhibit for the MINDWATCH Project
The Computational Medicine Lab Won the First Place in the 2023 NYU Tandon Research Excellence Exhibit for a demonstration titled “Physiological Signal Processing for Mental Well-Being” in Areas of Excellence category for the MINDWATCH Project.
Read more about the event here:
2023 NYU Tandon Research Excellence Exhibit
Outreach to Next Generation of Engineers
- Rose was featured at the International Summer School on Bio-X: Data Science and Engineering in Medicine and Biology co-sponsored by NSF, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and IEEE BRAIN in Crete. She gave presentations on “Smartwatch-Brain Interface Architectures for Mental Well-Being” and “Computational Medicine for Closed-Loop Therapy.”
- Rose was featured as a panelist for the “Women in Biomedical Engineering Panel 2: Nurturing the Next Generation Workforce in Healthcare: Balancing Academics, Industry, and Life” at the IEEE EMBS Inaugural Women in Biomedical Engineering Forum in Australia.
Engagements with National Academies
Rose was invited by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to the 2023 EU-US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (EU-US FOE), organized by NAE and the European Council of Applied Sciences, Technologies, and Engineering hosted by Nokia Bell Labs. EU-US FOE includes 60 early-career engineers from EU and US universities, industry, and government.
In 2023, Rose joined the PNAS Nexus Editorial Board as a Board of Reviewing Editors (BoRE) member. PNAS Nexus is published by the National Academy of Sciences in partnership with Oxford University Press. The Board of Reviewing Editors includes (1) Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences, (2) Physical Sciences and Engineering, and (3) Social and Political Sciences. Rose was selected for the Physical Sciences and Engineering category.
CML Patents
Patent granted in April 2023:
Faghih, R. T., E. N. Brown, and A. K. Styer. System and method for automated ovarian follicular monitoring, 2023. US Patent 11,622,744.
Filed provisional patents:
Faghih, R. T., R. Reddy, and S. Khazaei. A system and method for estimating emotional valence based on measurements of respiration, 2023. US Patent App 63/514,825.
Faghih, R. T. and S. Khazaei. Systems and methods for estimating interoceptive awareness state using eye-tracking measurements, 2023. US Patent App 63/584,814.
Research: Stress Regulation
CML research work titled “Enhancement of closed-loop cognitive stress regulation using supervised control architectures“ in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology. This work was covered by Medical Xpress in an article which reads: “Feeling overwhelmed, anxious and agitated are among the symptoms associated with high levels of cognitive stress…” Read the article on Medical Xpress.
Research: Emotional Valence Estimation from Facial EMG
CML research work on the estimation of emotional valence from facial electromyogram measurements in Frontiers in Neuroscience. This work was completed as part of a course project for the graduate course titled “State-Space Estimation with Physiological Applications.”
The work was also featured in a research brief by NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Read more in NYU News
Research: Leptin Dynamics & Obesity
- CML paper on “Sparse system identification of leptin dynamics in women with obesity” has been described by Medical Xpress and labroots. The paper studied the differences in leptin hormone dynamics before and after treatment in obese women, and the causality relationship between leptin and the stress hormone, cortisol. Read in UH News.
CML Public Dataset
A new dataset, “A Wearable Exam Stress Dataset for Predicting Cognitive Performance in Real-World Settings,” comprising physiological signals measured using wearables to estimate stress was generated by CML. Research based on this dataset has been published in IEEE Healthcare Innovations in Point of Care Technology (HIPOCT) and can be accessed here.
Rose presented CML’s research at NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) (video), NYU Science Talks Science Talk on Intelligent Bio-X Interfaces, NYU Biomedical Engineering Colloquium, University of Houston Biomedical Engineering Seminar, Psychoneuroendocrinology and Immunology Research Consortium Seminar at the University of Arkansas’s department of Psychological Science and MIT Neural Signal Processing Seminar.
Rose gave an invited talk on “A Mathematical Framework for Decoding and Regulating Cognitive Arousal using Smartwatches of the Future” at the mini-symposium on “Dynamical Modeling for Neurotechnology Applications.”
- CML students and postdoc had oral and poster presentations in IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference 2023 held in Sydney, Australia on: 1. The estimation of emotional valence state from respiration signal, 2. The effect of treatment on leptin in premenopausal obese women, 3. The changes in cortisol secretion during cardiac surgery, and 4. The effect of cardiac surgery on cytokine expression in the inflammatory response.
- Ph.D. student Saman Khazaei presented an invited talk at a special session on “Enabling Closed-Loop Technologies for Mental Health: Biobehavioral Sensor Informatics and Just-in-Time Interventions,” based on the MINDWATCH project, at the 2023 IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics.
- Ph.D. student Saman Khazaei gave a presentation on “Decoding a Neurofeedback-Modulated Performance State in Presence of a Time-Varying Process Noise Variance” at the 2022 IEEE Asilomar Conference in November.
- Ph.D. student Saman Khazaei presented research on cognitive arousal estimation from wearables at 48th Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC 2022) and NYU Langone Medical AI Seminar Series.
CML Updates
Open access code:
– CML has generated 12 open-source code repositories via GitHub.
– including (1) investigation of the relationship between cognitive performance and arousal, (2) closed loop energy regulation for patients with cortisol disorders and others.
Team: We welcomed new members to CML in 2022 and 2023.
Postdoctoral Associate: Vidya Raju
Ph.D. Students: Saman Khazaei and Revanth Reddy
M.S. Student: Qing Xiang
Lab outreach: CML participated in 2022 “Women in STEM Campus Tour” with the aim of encouraging girls from the Poly Prep High School to consider engineering as a future career path. CML lab member Saman Khazaei spoke with them about the MINDWATCH project.
2022 News
Mindwatch update: Physiological characterization of electrodermal activity enables scalable near real-time autonomic nervous system activation inference
CML graduate student Rafiul Amin and Rose published a near real-time algorithm for inferring nervous system activation using skin conductance in PLOS Computational Biology. This work has received vast media attention and has been outlined by Yahoo news , MSN, Gadgets and Wearables, Global Health News Wire, News Azi, The Mirage, News Medical Life Science, Medical Republic, and Medical Xpress.
Mindwatch: Hybrid Decoders for Inferred Arousal Events and External Influences
An open access book on “Bayesian Filter Design for Computational Medicine: A State-Space Estimation Framework” authored by Dilranjan S. Wickramasuriya and Rose T. Faghih is to be published by Springer in April 2024.
Rose Served as Expert Panelist
Rose served as an expert panelist at the 2022 National Science Foundation Cyber Physical Systems Principal Investigator meeting as part of the mini-workshop on “Artificial Intelligence (AI) for healthcare“, and 2022 IEEE Healthcare Innovations – Point of Care Technologies (HI-PoCT) conference on the challenges and opportunities in the point-of-care technologies.
Rose was Interviewed by Various Media Outlets as a Wearables Expert
Rose explained the ability of wearables such as MINDWATCH to improve quality of health and reduce hospitalizations in Renal and Urology News and outlined the potential of wearables in determining the stress for The Washington post. She also shared insights on the role of wearable technology on mental health in an interview with verywellmind. Read on The Washington Post, Renal and Urology News, and verywellmind.
Invited Talks and Research Seminars
Rose Faghih presented CML’s research at NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) (video), NYU Science Talks Science Talk on Intelligent Bio-X Interfaces, NYU Biomedical Engineering Colloquium, University of Houston Biomedical Engineering Seminar, Psychoneuroendocrinology and Immunology Research Consortium Seminar at the University of Arkansas’s department of Psychological Science and MIT Neural Signal Processing Seminar.
Rose was inducted into the inaugural class of the Early Career Distinguished Alumni (ECDA) Society at the A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park
Rose was inducted into the inaugural class of the Early Career Distinguished Alumni (ECDA) Society at the A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park. Read in UMD News here. The announcement reads, “The ECDA Society recognizes the innovations, leadership, and impact made by Maryland Engineering alumni 40 years and under. The chosen alumni are at the forefront of their respective fields and have demonstrated excellence in leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, and service.” Earlier this year, UMD reported on Rose’s move to NYU.
CML Generated a Wearable Exam Stress Dataset
A new dataset, “A Wearable Exam Stress Dataset for Predicting Cognitive Performance in Real-World Settings,” comprising physiological signals measured using wearables to estimate stress was generated by CML. Research based on this dataset has been published in IEEE Healthcare Innovations in Point of Care Technology (HIPOCT) and can be accessed here. Read more on ScienceDaily.
CML Journal Publications and Media Feature
Several articles were published by CML this year, in journals including IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, IEEE Access, Frontiers in neuroscience, IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, Frontiers in Endocrinology, PLoS Computational Biology, andJournal of the Endocrine Society.
CML research work on the estimation of emotional valence from facial electromyogram measurements in Frontiers in Neuroscience. This work was completed as part of a course project for the graduate course titled “State-Space Estimation with Physiological Applications.”
The work was also featured in a research brief by NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Recent CML paper “Sparse system identification of leptin dynamics in women with obesity” has been featured by Medical Xpress and labroots. The paper studied the differences in leptin hormone dynamics before and after treatment in obese women, and the causality relationship between leptin and the stress hormone, cortisol.
Read the article in Medical Xpress and labroots.
Research by Rose Faghih and students of CML in collaboration with researchers at the National Institute of Health studied the effects of disruption of sleep on the secretion of growth hormone in pubertal children. This work was published in the Journal of Endocrine Society and is part of a body of CML research pertaining to the study of neuroendocrinal hormones in various populations.
Read the Journal of Endocrine Society article.
CML research work titled “Enhancement of closed-loop cognitive stress regulation using supervised control architectures“ in the IEEE Journal of Open Engineering in Biology and Medicine. Media feature by Medical Xpress reads: “Feeling overwhelmed, anxious and agitated are among the symptoms associated with high levels of cognitive stress…” Read the article on Medical Xpress.
CML Conference Publications and Presentations
- CML research was presented at 2022 IEEE Healthcare Innovations and Point of Care Technologies (HI-POCT) and 56th Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers.
- Doctoral student Saman Khazaei presented research on cognitive arousal estimation from wearables at 48th Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC 2022) and NYU Langone Medical AI Seminar Series (also known as ClubMedAI).
CML Participation in IEEE Conference Spotlighted in University of Houston News
University of Houston news covered the spotlight of research papers by members of CML in a conference. The article reads: “Four students and a faculty member affiliated with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the Cullen College of Engineering had their research papers spotlighted at the 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC). Rose Faghih, Ph.D., formerly an Assistant Professor at UH, is an author on the papers and oversaw the work…”
Read in UH News here
2021 News
Mindwatch: CML Presentations
CML Doctoral students (Fekri Azgomi, H and Amin, M.R) have had a live presentation at the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Principal Investigators’ meeting regarding the MINDWATCH project.
CML Publications
- Rose contributed as an author of a book published by Frontiers in Neuroscience comprising multiple papers which mainly investigate deep brain stimulation (DBS).
- CML published several journal papers including IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Access, Frontiers in neuroscienceand PLoS ONE. These research works involved seizure state tracking using Electroencephalography (EEG) Data, designing a closed-loop system for stress regulation using fuzzy logic control, closed- loop fuzzy energy regulation, and robust point-process Granger causality analysis.
- Three conference papers were published in the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) which characterize the cognitive arousal and performance states, and their relationship using non-invasive data such as skin conductance variation, Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data, and reaction times.
CML Journal Publications
CML paper in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering developed a new inference engine to obtain a sympathetic nervous system activation from raw electrodermal activity (EDA) recordings, overcoming previous challenges from earlier approaches. Read more
CML outlines new approach for management of Cushing’s disease. The published work in Frontiers in neuroscience presents a way to employ a wearable brain machine interface architecture to regulate one’s energy levels in hypercortisolism. In our proposed architecture, we infer one’s cognitive energy-related state using wearable devices and close the loop utilizing fuzzy control. Read more
CML Outreach
CML hosted 2021 Girls Engineering the Future Outreach in a virtual manner. CML also continued its public outreach work by posting videos onto its YouTube channel. The videos posted this year draw attention to senior design projects, class projects, and several others that are meant as brief tutorials for teaching concepts related to controls. The YouTube videos are part of CML’s broader effort of popularizing scientific research among the general public.
CML graduate students presented their research at The Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference. Their works mainly describe the music impacts on the cognitive arousal and performance during the memory tasks.
CML Student Graduations
- Md. Rafiul Amin defended his thesis “Scalable and Robust Inference of Sparse Brain Signals via Personalized Physiological System Identification“.
- Hamid Fekri Azgomidefended his thesis “Closed-Loop Regulation of Internal Brain States using Wearable Brain Machine Interface Architectures with Real-World Experimental Implementation.”
- Luciano Brancodefended his thesis “Closed-Loop Control of Brain States using Physiological Signals from Wearable Devices“.
- Saman Khazaei defended his thesis “Bayesian Decoder Design for Investigation of Cognitive ffu and Performance Using Physiological and Behavioral Data“.
2020 News
Rose Received an NSF CAREER Award
Rose received the NSF CAREER Award for her proposal entitled “MINDWATCH: Multimodal Intelligent Noninvasive brain state Decoder for Wearable AdapTive Closed-loop arcHitectures.” She proposed using smartwatch-like devices to infer brain states that are typically inaccessible except via neurotechnologies such as electroencephalography (EEG). Instead, tiny variations in sweat secretions and changes in heart (pulse) rates can be used to infer some of this information, and eventually be used to provide closed-loop therapy for patient care. Read more
MIT Technology Review selected Rose as one of the visionaries in its list of Innovators Under 35 for the year 2020. The recognition highlighted her idea of sensor-laden wrist-watches that could monitor states of the brain traditionally accessed via neuroimaging technologies such as EEG. The idea would not only have clinical relevance for treating patients with neuropsychiatric or hormone disordersbut would also have applicability to people who want to improve everyday health as well. Futuroprossimo, an Italian futurology magazine, also highlighted her as one of the three MIT Technology Review’s 2020 Innovators Under 35 female awardees, who work on an innovation that has the highest potential for a future Nobel prize. Read more
Rose presented CML’s research findings at several invited talksincluding the Medical Wearables Conference, University of Maryland IEEE Leadership Seminar, MIT Technology Review’s Conference on Emerging Technologies, MIT Neural Signal Processing Seminar, and University of Texas Health Science IoT and Aging in Place Workshop.
The Cullen College of Engineering recognized Rose’s contributions to research and teaching excellence in the 2019-2020 Faculty and Student Excellence Awards. She received a Teaching Excellence Award for outstanding teaching and service to students and a junior-level Faculty Research Excellence Award. Read more
Rose is featured by the IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine as a “Woman to Watch”. Her career from her student days to an assistant professor, her love for writing poetry and some of her outreach activities were described in an article published in the June issue. Rose’s work was featured by the IEEEXplore in August. CML’s work on tracking brain states based on tiny variations in sweat secretions was featured. Read more on the IEEE WIE Feature
Rose was selected For 2020-21 Interstellar Initiative, a program by the New York Academy of Science and theJapan Agency for Medical Research and Development to bring together promising young researchers from different countries to address major research challenges related to healthy longevity.
Students in Rose’s “State-space Estimation with Physiological Applications” class completed a number of projects in modeling the spread of COVID-19 infections in different parts of the world and created several YouTube videos to disseminate the knowledge to the general public. Read more
- CML Ph.D. student Hamid Fekri has been selected for the UH Cullen College of Engineering Future Faculty Program. The program is intended to prepare top-performing Ph.D. students for a successful career in academia.
- Jon Genty received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) for his summer research at CML. Jon’s work involves analyzing growth hormone and skin conductance data to investigate applications to disease diagnosis.
- CML graduate students presented posters at two conferences organized by Rice University: the Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Conference, and the Ken Kennedy Institute Data Science Virtual Conference. The posters featured some of CML’s latest work on sparse deconvolution, estimation, and control with regard to recovering unobserved brain states from peripheral physiological signals.
Four CML students graduated in 2020
Dilranjan Wickramasuriyasuccessfully defended his PhD thesis in December 2020 as the first PhD graduate of CML.
Srinidhi Parshi and Divesh Pednekarsuccessfully defended their M.S. theses in May 2020 as the first two M.S. graduates of CML.
Jon Genty successfully defended his undergraduate Honors thesis in November 2020.
2019 News
Rose was selected in the 2019 National Academy of Engineering’s U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. Read more
CML Publications
CML reported in Frontiers in Neuroscience that a closed-loop brain stimulator, based on sweat response, can be developed for those who suffer an array of neuropsychiatric disorders. This research was covered by UH News, Science Daily, Psych Central, EurekAlert, New Medical, Biospace, Neuroscience News and other online news portals. Read more
Invited Talks
Invited Talks: Rose presented CML’s research findings at several invited talks including the Institute for Computational Medicine Distinguished Seminar Series at the Johns Hopkins University, the Biomedical Engineering Seminar at the University of Connecticut, Technology Collaboration Center Wearable Technologies Workshop at NASA Johnson Space Center, Industrial Engineering Seminar at the University of Houston, and the Invited Special Session on Wearable Sensor Informatics for Cardiopulmonary Monitoring at the IEEE Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics. Read more
Multiple journal papers were accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME) and IEEE Access. Read more
CML members attended the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC) in Germany and gave six presentations there. Read more
CML members presented five papers at the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers and the IEEE-EMB Special Topics Conference on Healthcare Innovations and Point-of-Care Technologies at the National Institute of Health. Three of these presentations were projects from the “State-Space Estimation with Physiological Applications” course designed and taught by Rose where two CML Ph.D. students served as teaching assistants. Moreover, another paper was based on one of the summer National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates projects at CML. Read more
- Srinidhi Parshi came second at the ECE Department’s Graduate Research Conference and received the 7×24 Exchange International South Texas Award.
- Srinidhi Parshi received the National Science Foundation student travel award at the IEEE Biomedical and Health Informatics Conference.
- Dilranjan Wickramasuriya received an Honorable Mention Award for his poster at the Graduate Research Showcase.
- Dilranjan Wickramasuriya, Hamid Fekri, and Md. Rafiul Amin received the Cullen Fellowship Travel Grants to attend IEEE conferences.
- A team of undergraduate senior design students mentored at CML came second in the ECE Department’s capstone design competition.
- Undergraduate Samantha Havens received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship for her research at CML.
- Outreach: CML hosted over 80 girls at CML as a part of the Chevron Girls Engineering the Future event.