Carnegie Bosch Fellowship
2025 Faculty Hosts
Prospective Areas of Research for Fellows
Artificial Intelligence
Beidi Chen
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Long-context Modeling and Generation
2) Next-Gen Model Architecture beyond Current Scaling Law
3) Foundation Model Understanding & Reasoning Enhancement
4) Democratized AI with Efficient Algorithm, System, and Hardware
Intention for CBI Fellow: The CBI Postdoctoral Fellow can play a pivotal role in advancing and extending the impact of my research by contributing to the following directions: 1) Develop algorithms for handling extended sequences, enabling applications like video understanding and document summarization, 2) Design innovative architectures that enhance efficiency, robustness, and adaptability, moving beyond current scaling laws, 3) Improve the reasoning, interpretability, and trustworthiness of foundation models, 4) Create resource-efficient AI systems leveraging software and hardware innovations to make advanced AI accessible to broader, resource-limited communities.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/chen-beidi.html
Yuejie Chi
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Algorithmic foundation of AI+ 2) Design and development of learning algorithms in sample/resource-starved complex environments
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to develop novel algorithms with performance guarantees for reinforcement learning in multi-agent and federated settings, using historically
available datasets. Extension and testing of such algorithms in practical/interdisciplinary use cases is encouraged.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/chi-yuejie.html
Doron Cohen
Assistant Professor, Engineering and Public Policy
Research Areas:
1) Enhancing reliability and safety in socio-technical systems
2) Operational redundancy in human-AI collaborations
3) AI in high-stakes environments
Intention for CBI Fellow: The CBI Postdoctoral Fellow will advance this research by developing and implementing systematic tests that bridge basic research findings with practical applications. By creating prototypes and conducting field tests in high-stakes environments, the Fellow will help validate and refine our strategies for enhancing human-AI collaboration. Through interdisciplinary work involving artificial intelligence, cognitive science, public policy, and human-computer interaction, the Fellow will contribute to developing guidelines and informing policy for designing robust AI systems.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/cohen-doron.html
John Dolan
Principal Systems Scientist
Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Robot autonomy
2) Safe control for autonomous vehicles - with focus on social cooperation
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to develop new approaches and applications to modeling dynamics, behaviors, control, and safety in traffic and pedestrian scenarios.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/dolan-john.html
Dina El-Zanfaly
Assistant Professor, Design
Research Areas:
1) Human-Machine Interaction
2) Augmented XR
3) Participatory Design of AI Systems
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will expand research on developing and incorporating participatory design guidelines in developing AI systems by focusing on interactive AI-Augmented Reality applications for hands-on skills in manufacturing, such as welding. Through this investigation, we will be able to generate frameworks and guidelines that aim to be generalizable to other human-AI-XR applications.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/el-zanfaly-dina.html
Zackory Erickson
Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) AI methods for healthcare and advanced robotic manipulation
2) Physical human-robot interaction, multimodal perception, and physical simulation for HRI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The proposed area of research for the postdoc is AI modeling for multimodal perception and large language model (LLM) generalized control to advance robot manipulation of diverse liquids. Through this investigation, we aim to enhance our understanding of automated interaction with liquids, create novel datasets and AI-based perception and manipulation methods, and demonstrate our systems across realworld industries.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/erickson-zackory.html
Motahhare Eslami
Assistant Professor, Human Computer-Interaction Institute, Software and Societal Systems
Research Areas:
1) AI accountability
2) Social implications of AI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work on AI accountability, with a focus on investigating the challenges in AI systems, especially for marginalized communities. The postdoctoral fellow is expected to engage in interdisciplinary work and collaborate with both academic and industry partners.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/eslami-motahhare.html
Mohamed Farag
Assistant Teaching Professor, Information Networking Institute
Research Areas:
1) Intersection of generative AI and cloud infrastructure
2) Advancing software engineering methodologies in generative AI
3) Ethical deployment and accuracy of AI technologies
Intention for CBI Fellow: Having a dedicated researcher in the fields of generative AI and cloud infrastructure significantly enhances our capacity to innovate within these technologies. This researcher’s expertise not only accelerates the development of advanced software engineering processes but also strengthens our ability to address critical challenges, such as disinformation in AI- generated content. By pioneering more ethical and reliable AI systems, this researcher will drive the adoption of AI technologies across various sectors, fostering safer and more informed decision-making environments
Faculty Profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/farag-mohamed.html
Fei Fang
Associate Professor, Software and Societal Systems
Research Areas:
1) LLM-based agents for multi-agent scenarios
2) Game theory
3) Multi-agent reinforcement learning
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will expand research at the intersection of LLMs, game theory, (multi-agent) reinforcement learning. The postdoc will be an expert in at least one of those three areas, with a good understanding of the other two in order to perform research as well as mentor or advise Ph.D. students. The focus of the investigation is to develop intelligent agents that can operate in real-world scenarios that feature multi-agent cooperation and competition.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/fang-fei.html
Mayank Goel
Associate Professor, Software and Societal Systems and HumanComputer Interaction Institute
Research Areas:
1) Sensing and Machine Learning
2) Security and Privacy
3) Healthcare
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will 1) Develop more advanced ML models to identify user behavior; 2) Develop AI agents to deliver personalized interventions; 3) Develop situation and context-aware agents to guide the user in medical situations; 4) Develop data visualization strategies to aid in clinical decision making; and 5) Build robust and scalable systems to facilitate larger field deployment.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/goel-mayank.html
Evelyn Gong
Assistant Professor of Operations Management, Tepper School of Business
Research Areas:
1) AI for supply chain and sustainability
2) Reinforcement learning, algorithms and optimization.
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will use domain expertise to design better artificial intelligent solutions for more sustainable and more efficient supply chains.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/gong-evelyn.html
Pulkit Grover
Angel Jordan Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Neuroscience Institute, Biomedical Engineering, Center for Neural Basis of Cognition
Research Areas: AI Theory and Development for brain stimulation and sensing
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work with engineers and biologists to bring AI into brain lab, developing novel algorithms for localized, selective stimulation and sensing of the brain.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/grover-pulkit.html
Noelia Grande Gutiérrez
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Biomedical Flows Simulation and Multiscale Modeling (BioSiMM) Lab
2) Enabling digital twins in healthcare
3) Cardiovascular flows and the potential of computational models for personalized diagnosis and treatment planning in cardiology
Intention for CBI Fellow: As a postdoctoral fellow, you would be an integral part of our team, working on developing new capabilities of our current models. Your contributions will be crucial in improving their generalizability to various cardiovascular problems and creating new modeling paradigms that are robust alternatives to traditional numerical solvers. As an extension of this work, we envision the integration of wearables and sensor data for long-term predictions and digital twin applications.
Faculty Profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/grande-gutierrez-noelia.html
Eni Halilaj
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Human movement biomechanics
2) Hybrid modeling (physics + deep learning)
3) Ubiquitous computing, with a focus on wearables
4) and smartphones
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to advance research in the area of physics-informed deep learning, with applications in computer vision and dynamic simulations of movement.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/halilaj-eni.html
Zakia Hammal
Systems Scientist, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Multimodal machine learning
2) Multimodal behavioral modeling from video
3) AI for health sciences and medicine
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would have the flexibility to contribute and expand the scope of research pursued in the group, e.g. in the areas of multimodal machine learning, domain transfer and adaptation, few shot learning, and federated learning for human behavior modeling from video.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/hammal-zakia.html
Hoda Heidari
K&L Gates Career Development Assistant Professor in Ethics and Computational Technologies
Research Areas:
1) Fairness in AI
2) Societal implications of AI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to understand and mitigate unfair disparities by applying machine learning models in socially consequential domains.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/heidari-hoda.html
Ken Holstein
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Research Areas:
1) AI design, development, and evaluation
2) Human-computer interaction focused on co-augmentation and colearning
Intention for CBI Fellow: We will explore and scope out mutually interesting HCI+AI system building projects (i.e., projects involving the design, development and testing of novel interactive interfaces) at the intersection of the Fellow's interests and one or more of the lab's focus areas. Potential focus areas include Augmented Intelligence, Participatory Approaches to AI, HumanAI Complementarity, Worker-Centered Design of AI, Participatory Design of Measurement and Evaluation Approaches for AI, Responsible AI, and more.
Faculty Profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/holstein-kenneth.html
Laszlo Jeni
Assistant Research Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Computer vision
2) Computational behavior science
3) Human sensing
4) Multimodal data synthesis
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will introduce new methodologies to enhance the computational analysis of human sensing, focusing on refining 3D face alignment techniques and human pose estimation under challenging conditions. Their contribution to the development of Social Digital Twins can expand the application of this concept into clinical psychology, education, and affective computing, deepening its practical implications.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/jeni-laszlo.html
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
Research Areas:
1) Sparsity in deep learning
2) Large-scale AI
3) ML systems
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would leverage sparse AI techniques and architectures to build a bridge between academia and industry, with focus on domains of interest for Bosch (e.g., manufacturing, engineering, supply chain management, and intelligent services).
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/jia-zhihao.html
Zhihao Jia
Carlee Joe-Wong
Robert E. Doherty Career Development Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Internet of Things
2) Distributed AI for resource-constrained devices
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to advance research in distributed AI by applying theoretical analysis and testbed experiments to industrial use cases.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/joe-wong-carlee.html
Gauri Joshi
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Distributed machine learning 2) Federated learning
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to expand the scope of ongoing research, addressing pertinent issues in federated learning. Furthermore, the postdoc is expected to help supervise Ph.D. students in the lab.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/joshi-gauri.html
Eunsuk Kang
Assistant Professor, Software and Societal Systems
Research Areas:
Safety and reliability of AI-driven software systems
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will be involved in the following: (1) developing new techniques for efficiently verifying the robustness of ML-based cyber-physical systems, especially in the context of multi-agent systems (e.g., multi-drone coordination); and (2) data-driven methods for improving the robustness of an existing system by learning from failure scenarios.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/kang-eunsuk.html
Valerie Karplus
Professor, Engineering and Public Policy
Research Areas:
1) AI and ML for decarbonizing heating requirements 2) Advanced machine learning algorithms
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would develop AI solutions to reveal important dependencies in plant design decisions and inform industry-specific projections of decarbonization strategies. Such AI solutions will be informed by interviews with industry experts, to which the team maintains broad connections, and by sustainable strategies (e.g., cost effectiveness, equitability). A major focus of this work would be on iron and steel and downstream automotive components manufacturing, but could be broadened.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/karplus-valerie.html
Swarun Kumar
Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Artificial Intelligence for wearable devices
2) Artificial Intelligence for health care
Intention for CBI Fellow: The proposed research will not merely be around data analytics but instead work end-to-end: the postdoc will work and speak to clinicians, be involved in user studies with patients, develop hardware and software platforms for sensor technologies as well as the AI/ML tools needed to process sensed data.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/kumar-swarun.html
Christian Lebiere
Research Faculty, Psychology
Research Areas:
1) Cognitive architectures
2) Cognitive models of human behavior
3) Human-Machine teaming in cyber domains
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to tackle theoretical and practical challenges related to applying cognitive architectures to cyber-security, with a focus on the integration of cognitive models with large knowledge repositories and scalable deep learning algorithms.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/lebiere-christian.html
Philip LeDuc
William J. Brown Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Computational Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering Director, Center for the Mechanics and Engineering of Cellular Systems
Research Areas:
Basic science and applied research in the intersection of mechanical engineering and biological systems ranging from algae to artificial cells to developmental biology.
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will leverage novel approaches in Artificial Intelligence to understand how general principles may apply across diverse nature-based systems.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/leduc-philip.html
Lei Li
Assistant Professor, Language Technologies Institute
Research Areas:
1) Trustworthy large language models
2) Multilingual NLP and translation
3) AI for science
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work on safe large language models (LLMs) and authenticity of LLM generation aiming to develop methods to ensure socially compatible, factual and ethical text as well as methods that can easily identify AI generated text versus human written text.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/li-lei.html
Christopher McComb
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering; Director, Human + AI Design Initiative
Research Areas:
1) Human-AI collaboration
2) Physics-informed machine learning
3) Digital twins of sociotechnical systems
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will have the opportunity to work on a broad variety of applications in areas like drone logistics, additive manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing, engineering design, and community resilience to climate change, conducting studies that are exclusively computational or also entail human-subjects research.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/mccomb-christopher.html
Axel Moore
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Research Areas:
AI for healthcare – Osteoarthritis detection
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will help to develop methods to detect and characterize relationships between in vivo biomarkers and accessible sensor technologies (e.g., fitbit). The Postdoctoral Fellow will have the opportunity to work closely with the PI and engage in human subjects research and work with clinicians, while furthering their development of an independent line of AI research.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/mccomb-christopher.html
Yorie Nakahira
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Neuroscience Institute, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Safety in Artificial Intelligence
2) Artificial Intelligence for real-time autonomous
3) systems
4) Adversarial Artificial Intelligence
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will leverage novel approaches in Artificial Intelligence to understand how general principles may apply across diverse nature-based systems.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/nakahira-yorie.html
Guannan Qu
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) AI/ML for real-world engineering systems.
2) Scalable and safe AI/ML solutions for large-scale networked systems (e.g. energy, traffic, edge devices)
3) Learning-based control
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would develop new algorithms and theories. Tentative topics include distributed and
scalable multi-agent reinforcement learning for edge devices, learning-based control and decision making in uncertain and timevarying environments, and embedding domain knowledge in model-free reinforcement learning.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/qu-guannan.html
Aditi Raghunathan
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
Research Areas:
1) Robust machine learning
2) Continual learning
3) Foundation models
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would lead projects in the main directions explored in the lab, working with and mentoring students in: 1) continual learning and adaptation to distribution shifts; and 2) leveraging large pre-trained models such as GPT3 and CLIP for improving robustness. The directions are relatively open-ended, requiring strong initiative, leadership and research experience to guide the development of appropriate benchmarks that reflect practically relevant situations, to work with large-scale models and come up with elegant technical solutions to improve performance.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/raghunathan-aditi.html
Aaditya Ramdas
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics and Data Science; Machine Learning
Research Areas: Differential Privacy
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to work in the area of differentially private statistical inference, applying Bayesian methods and machine learning models to study how valid statistical results can be obtained while guaranteeing minimal loss of privacy.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/ramdas-aaditya.html
Hong Shen
Assistant Research Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Research Areas:
1) Social, ethical and policy implications of algorithmic systems
2) Bias, fairness, social justice and power relations in AI and ML 3) Responsible AI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work to 1) bridge the gap between theoretical concepts and practical implementation; 2) foster collaborations between research and industry partners, which can provide valuable datasets, real-world problem statements, and avenues for implementing responsible AI solutions in practical settings; and 3) actively participate in policy discussions, contributing insights into ethical guidelines,
regulations, and industry standards related to AI ethics and responsible AI deployment.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/shen-hong.html
Guanya Shi
Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Machine learning
2) Control theory
3) Safe and structured reinforcement learning
4) Agile robotics
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will join one of the main research directions in the lab, taking an active role in shaping and directing research: 1) Safe robotics control with learned agility; 2) Offline learning and online adaptation; 3) Model-based and model-free reinforcement learning
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/shi-guanya.html
Dimitrios Skarlatos
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Research Areas:
1) Computer architectures
2) Operating Systems
3) Security
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will create AI-optimized system primitives for secure and efficient multi-tenancy of AI-specific hardware such as GPUs, TPUs and other data-parallel architectures. With this project, the postdoctoral fellow is expected to enable sustainable and secure AI, drastically improving the utilization of datacenters. The
postdoc will actively mentor PhD students and get firsthand experience of how to manage and actively bootstrap a research-oriented lab.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/skarlatos-dimitrios.html
Associate Professor, Machine Learning
Research Areas:
1) Automated ML (AutoML)
2) Human-in-the-Loop Learning
3) Machine Learning Systems (MLSys)
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would play a crucial role in pushing forward our group’s research agenda, including (but not limited to) leading new research problems, mentoring junior students, leading reading groups, helping with teaching, spawning new collaborations, and disseminating results at conferences, workshops, and additional academic and industry-focused venues. The specific role will be tailored to the Fellow’s interests and future goals.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/talwalkar-ameet.html
Director of CMU-Africa and Associate Dean for International Affairs –Africa; Professor, CMU-Africa, Mechanical Engineering
Research Areas:
1) AI for resilient systems
2) Cyber-security via adversarial reinforcement learning
Ameet Talwalkar
Conrad Tucker
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would join the main effort in the lab, which seeks to create more resilient and secure engineering systems by applying AI-based design. In particular, we seek to address the current need for better benchmark datasets which are more representative of complex engineering systems, and use these new benchmarks to direct impactful, real-world research.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/tucker-conrad.html
Shubham Tulsiani
Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) 3D vision
2) Learning for manipulation
3) Physics-based interference
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would work at the intersection of 3D vision with robotics/graphics and build machine perception systems that enable advances in mixed reality/robot manipulation
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/tulsiani-shubham.html
Weina Wang
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
Research Areas:
1) Reinforcement learning for operations research
2) Dimension reduction
3) Resource management
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will join the main ongoing research direction in the lab, collaborating with a broader set of researchers from different institutions and taking an active role in pushing and disseminating the foundational work proposed in this grant.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/wang-weina.html
Shinji Watanabe
Associate Professor, Language Technologies Institute
Research Areas:
1) Speech and Language Processing
2) Conversational AI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to contribute to research in conversational AI systems, focusing on speech foundation models and investigating how to incorporate multimodal information in such systems.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/watanabe-shinji.html
Osman Yağan
Research Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Secure and resilient decentralized machine learning
2) IoT security
3) Algorithms for sequential decision-making
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would work on mature research on secure distributed networks, taking it to the next stage to demonstrate its impact across applications.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/yagan-osman.html
Andrea Zanette
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) LLM reasoning
2) LLM alignment
3) LLM efficiency
Intention for CBI Fellow: We are seeking a dynamic postdoctoral fellow to advance research in foundation models within a collaborative and fast-paced environment. This position offers an opportunity to work on cutting-edge topics such as reasoning, alignment, and efficiency of large language models. Responsibilities include contributing unique expertise, mentoring PhD students, and fostering a vibrant research culture.
Faculty Profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/zanette-andrea.html
Ding Zhao
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering Courtesy Appointment, Computer Science Department, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Trustworthy AI robots
2) High-stakes applications in autonomous vehicles and healthcare 3) Fundamental AI safety, reinforcement learning, and robust perception algorithms
Intention for CBI Fellow: A CBI Fellow would lead crucial research into privacy vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms in autonomous vehicle systems. While my lab has established strong foundations in safety and robustness, we seek to expand into privacy protection, particularly against malicious attacks. The Fellow would investigate privacy attacks in sensor data manipulation, vehicle-to-vehicle communication breaches, and the privacy vulnerabilities in generative AV, such as LLM integration in AV systems. We are also interested in foundation models for generalist robots for manufacturing.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/zhao-ding.html
Cybersecurity + Privacy
Alessandro Acquisti
Trustee Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy, Heinz College
Research Areas:
1) Behavioral Economics of Privacy
2) Decision Science
3) Human Computer Interaction
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will conduct research at the intersection of computer science, economics, and decision science with a focus on privacy choices and outcomes. The postdoctoral fellow is expected to work in close collaboration with the Faculty Host, co-designing and co-running large scale empirical studies.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/acquisti-alessandro.html
Jonathan Aldrich
Professor, Software and Societal Systems Director, Software Engineering Ph.D. program
Research Areas:
1) Programming languages
2) Formal verification
3) Human computer interaction (for PL)
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to contribute to development of novel, usable programming languages, type systems tools for domains such as IoT applications.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/aldrich-jonathan.html
Lujo Bauer
Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Software and Societal Systems
Research Areas:
1) Security of AI
2) ML for security and privacy
3) Usability aspects of security and privacy
4) Formal methods
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would have the flexibility to contribute to and expand the scope of research we're pursuing in usable security and privacy at the intersection of security and AI, e.g., developing attacks and defenses for MLbased malware classifiers and autonomous vehicle control algorithms; defining realistic threat models for uses of AI.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/bauer-lujo.html
Justin Chan
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Software and Societal Systems Department
Research Areas:
1) Privacy preserving acoustic sensing systems
2) Embedded privacy safeguards at all levels of the technology stack
Intention for CBI Fellow: I am interested in privacy-preserving techniques, including (1) point cloud object obscuration techniques that resist reconstruction attempts without degrading system utility (2) lightweight algorithms which extend to resourceconstrained devices like smart glasses and small drones (3) generalization techniques that work in the presence of motion blur, and different environments. The postdoc can work on a modular, add-on privacy-layer that robustly detects and obscures sensitive objects without significantly affecting the robot’s ability to navigate and map the environment. All project artifacts will be
made open-source and enhance privacy protections for consumers and businesses.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/chan-justin.html
Nicolas Christin
Professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Software and Societal Systems Department
Courtesy Appointment, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) World-wide scale measurements of web and internet censorship
2) Censorship-circumvention techniques
3) Measurement of "breakage"
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoctoral fellow with the right background (i.e., good networking background, understanding of common machine learning techniques, and knowledge of statistical tools) and, most importantly, the ability to learn very quickly new concepts would help both in building the infrastructure we need to carry out this research, and in analyzing the data and producing papers.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/christin-nicolas.html
Hanan Hibshi
Assistant Teaching Professor, Information Networking Institute
Research Areas: Cybersecurity and Privacy
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work in the broad area of cybersecurity education. Within the scope of this investigation, the postdoc can help advance the field, with the possibility of conducting empirical studies by recruiting master-level students, or dive deeper into practical problems like safe code design. The postdoc can also suggest novel topics in the area of cybersecurity
and privacy that align with the host's research direction and interests.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/hibshi-hanan.html
Limin Jia
Research Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Formal methods
2) Security aspects of web-languages, systems, and API
3) Language based techniques for system security
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would have the flexibility to contribute and expand the scope of research pursued in the group, e.g. in area of formal methods, taint tracking, attacks in Javascript systems/Node JS, information flow security for smart home devices.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/jia-limin.html
Bryan Parno
Professor, Computer Science Department, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Building practical, provably secure systems
2) Formal verification
3) Applied cryptography
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work to develop provably correct and secure systems at scale by applying, developing, and advancing formal verification tools.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/parno-bryan.html
Corina Pasareanu
Principal Systems Scientist, CyLab
Research Areas:
1) Safe and robust AI
2) Certifiable compliance and robustness of neural networks
3) Explainable and trustworthy AI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will play a key role in developing evaluation tools needed for the analysis of end-to-end autonomous systems, as well as developing incremental methods for certifying fine-tuned models.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/pasareanu-corina.html
Riccardo Paccagnella
Assistant Professor, Software and Societal Systems
Research Areas:
System and hardware security
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would assist with understanding and mitigating new classes of attacks where an
adversary exploits hardware features to leak software’s sensitive data.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/paccagnella-riccardo.html
Jon
Peha
Professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Privacy aspects of future wireless systems
2) Privacy preserving resource allocation
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will contribute to enhancing the privacy aspects of spectrum sharing in wireless networks. This includes analyzing attacks and proposing and demonstrating novel techniques for privacy preserving resource allocation in sharedspectrum systems and future wireless systems.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/peha-jon.html
Norman Sadeh
Professor, Software and Societal Systems, CyLab Co-Director, Privacy Engineering Program
Research Areas:
1) Usable privacy
2) Human assistants for privacy
3) Privacy aspects of IoT systems
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would have the flexibility to contribute and expand the scope of research pursued in the group in the area of design and validation privacy agents for human decisions and assistance and data collection and studying the public policy aspects of such systems.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/sadeh-norman.html
Vyas Sekar
Tan Family Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Next generation security and systems
2) Approximate computing for network telemetry
3) Automating cyber response
4) Synthetic data for cybersecurity
Intention for CBI Fellow: It can be a great stepping stone for fellows to go into impactful academic/research careers having access to CMU/Cylab/Bosch.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/sekar-vyas.html
Mark Sherman
Technical Director, Cyber Security Foundations, Software Engineering Institute, CERT
Research Areas:
Media authenticity
1) Deep fake detection, watermarking, camouflage, and deception
2) Cyber-physical sensor and signal analysis
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will develop techniques for deep fake detection or prevention (medium based on interests), build a prototype and measure its effectiveness. The system
would be expected to be engineered for qualities associated with good software practices, with an emphasis on deployability, maintainability and quality.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/sherman-mark.html
Justine Sherry
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Research Areas:
1) Network security
2) Adversarial inputs
3) Input overload
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will work to leverage a wide range of techniques to tackle the challenges of security against overload, with new designs that are based on novel hardware, software, and algorithmic innovation.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/sherry-justine.html
Bryan Wilder
Assistant Professor, Machine Learning
Research Areas:
1) AI for decision making in healthcare
2) Fairness in AI
3) Optimization under resource constraints
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will join one of two main research directions: 1) Developing methods that integrate machine learning and optimization to improve decision-making under resource constraints; 2) Leveraging large healthcare-related data to inform epidemic response.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/wilder-bryan.html
Wenting Zheng
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department
Research Areas:
1) Applied cryptography
2) Privacy preserving computing technology
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will be responsible for advancing the theoretical and practical aspects of privacy preserving computing systems.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/zheng-wenting.html
Robotics
Kaushik Dayal
Walter J. Blenko, Sr. Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Courtesy Appointment, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering
Research Areas:
Modeling of electroactive polymers for soft robotics AI in high-stakes environments
Intention for CBI Fellow: Can enable looking at performancelimiting issues such as high-voltage breakdown
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/dayal-kaushik.html
Inseung Kang
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Courtesy Appointment, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Wearable assistive technologies, such as exoskeletons
2) Integrating advanced mechatronic design with artificial intelligence
Intention for CBI Fellow: The CBI Postdoctoral Fellow will contribute to the development of a generalizable exoskeleton control framework, designed for real-world deployment across diverse users. This project demands interdisciplinary expertise in robotics, deep learning, simulation, and gait biomechanics, skills that often surpass the experience of PhD students new to the field. The postdoctoral fellow's knowledge will accelerate the framework's development and refine the pilot testing process, enhancing feasibility and efficacy evaluations. Their involvement will ensure the research makes a significant, high-impact
contribution to the field by bridging gaps toward practical applications.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/kang-inseung.html
Changliu Liu
Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Developing provably safe autonomous robotic systems
2) Humanoid robots
Intention for CBI Fellow: This fellowship can help support initial development of the testbed and allow the researchers to explore risky research topics, with the hope to generate preliminary results for future funding. The Postdoctoral Fellow will study safety of humanoid robots in the presence of adversarial virtual agents or physical agents in the environment.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/liu-changliu.html
Carmel Majidi
Clarence H. Adamson Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Courtesy Appointments, Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Soft robotics
2) Soft electronics for applications in automation, human machine interaction, and wearable computing
3) Novel materials and manufacturing techniques for soft machines and electronics
Intention for CBI Fellow: A postdoctoral fellow could help with the discovery of novel soft material architectures, development of soft robotic implementations that utilize these materials, and/or algorithms for sensing, control, path planning, and learning of soft robotic systems
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/majidi-carmel.html
Zachary
Manchester
Assistant Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Optimization, control, motion planning, and navigation for robotic systems
2) Real-time model-predictive control applications
3) Sustainability and conservation
Intention for CBI Fellow: The CBI fellow would have a broad mandate to contribute to projects in my lab and build their own strong research identity. In general, I would be looking for a postdoc with their own research vision that is complementary to, but distinct from my own who would bring something new to the lab. I would empower a CBI fellow to establish and grow their own project within the broad scope of my lab.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/manchester-zachery.html
Jean Oh
Associate Research Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) Robot intelligence
2) Human-robot collaboration
Intention for CBI Fellow: A CBI fellow will investigate the humanrobot interaction (HRI) part of robot intelligence. For instance, in addition to behavioral models, we plan to investigate the impact of the physical design of a robot, a well-known factor that shapes
3) Adversarial modelling
user expectations. A CBI Fellow will work on generative tools and algorithms to design robot embodiments for soft robots and investigate the impact of various design factors.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/oh-jean.html
Samuel Pagliarini
Special Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Intersection of computer chip design and cybersecurity/privacy issues
2) Cryptographic acceleration, hardware trojan horses, protection of intellectual property, random number generators, and silicon-based signatures (PUFs)
Intention for CBI Fellow: I am working on several hard problems that are fit for a postdoctoral researcher seeking to own a careerdefining topic in the domain of hardware security. The largest of these problems is how to give chip design tools some notion of security awareness, which today is completely inexistent.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/pagliarini-samuel-nascimento.html
Sebastian Scherer
Associate Research Professor, Robotics Institute
Research Areas:
1) AI for real-world robotics
2) Neuro-symbolic AI
Intention for CBI Fellow: The CBI fellow would explore new paradigms in AI and robotics that have potential to fundamentally advance the state-of-the-art towards universal robots while still being grounded in real-world robotics applications.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/scherer-sebastian.html
Sustainability
Jeremy Michalek
Professor, Engineering and Public Policy
Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering (by courtesy) Director, Carnegie Mellon Vehicle Electrification Group
Research Areas:
1) Vehicle Electrification Group
2) Technology, economic, environmental, behavioral and public policy aspects of electric vehicles and other transportation trends
Intention for CBI Fellow: We are interested in pursuing new research on technical, economic and policy factors for recycling and repurposing used EV batteries. We are also interested in vehicle-grid interactions, charging infrastructure issues for variable demand and heterogeneous residential charging availability, EV battery supply chain vulnerabilities, consumer behavior, and understanding policy options and implications. We also develop theory and methods to inform analysis used to design policy in practice, including optimization and AI/ML, and we have done extensive work on life cycle environmental implications of the transition to EVs (more still to do). We also use statistics, econometrics, ML and causal inference to understand how policy and technology decisions have affected technical, economic, environmental and social outcomes.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/michalek-jeremy.html
Evan Spotte-Smith
Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Intersection of "AI" (data science) and sustainability 2) Complex reactive systems in catalysis and energy storage
Intention for CBI Fellow: As a CBI Fellow myself, I have seen how the freedom of the fellowship provides space for postdoctoral researchers to explore significant challenges from multiple different directions. Working with a CBI Fellow would therefore be an excellent way to kick-start a new research direction, whether that involves a new sustainable application or a new methodological approach. For sustainability research to be impactful, it must contribute to or create solutions which are technically, economically, and socially sound.
Faculty Profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/spotte-smith-evan.html
2023 CBI Faculty Hosts (not taking new CBI fellows until 2025)
Sauvik
Das
Assistant Professor Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Research Areas:
1) Human-centered security and privacy
2) Subversive AI / Anti-surveillance technologies
3) Ethical decentralization / cryptocurrencies
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would have the flexibility to contribute and expand the scope of research pursued in the group in area of privacy aspects human interactive systems such as privacy for surveillance cameras, ambient sensing, data collection systems, and the human aspects of security for web 3 and decentralized systems.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/das-sauvik.html
Aaron Johnson
Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Robotics Institute
Research Areas: Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Control in real-world and simulated environments
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc would develop novel systems inspired by reinforcement learning, adaptive control and dynamic modeling, with the goal of enabling wheeled/legged robots to operate in challenging environments.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/johnson-aaron.html
Virginia Smith
Assistant Professor, Machine Learning, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Federated learning
2) Data privacy
3) Collaborative learning
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will drive efforts at the intersection of machine learning, privacy, security, and distributed systems, and develop new approaches for private and trustworthy machine learning. Furthermore, the postdoc will interface with other faculty at CMU and with experts at Bosch deploying federated/collaborative learning techniques.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/smith-virginia.html
Steven Wu
Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Software and Societal Systems, Machine Learning
Research Areas:
1) Differential privacy
2) Fairness + Privacy in AI systems
3) Privacy preserving machine learning
4) Privacy preserving synthetic data generation
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will be responsible for theoretical and applied contributions at the intersection of privacy and AI systems, namely training with differential privacy constraints, privacy for model personalization, and differentially private synthetic data generation.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/wu-steven.html
2024 CBI Faculty Hosts (not taking new CBI fellows until 2026)
Cleotilde Gonzalez
Full Research Professor of Social and Decision Sciences, Founding Director of Dynamic Decision Making Laboratory, and Co-Director of the National NSF institute for AI for Decision Making (AI-SDM)
Research Areas:
1) Dynamic decision making
2) Behavioral cybersecurity
3) Computational cognitive science
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to work on advanced algorithms and models of human decision processes, expanding on current research with focus on human-machine teaming.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/gonzalez-cleotilde.html
Rachel Kurchin
Assistant Research Professor, Materials Science and Engineering Courtesy Appointment, Physics
Research Areas:
1) Materials for clean energy technologies (including generation/conversion and storage)
2) Using AI to assist with climate modeling and simulations
Intention for CBI Fellow: My research will be involved in both software development and application efforts of AI for materials design and discovery, including graph-based models and generative approaches. One interesting challenge in this space is that of designing models that are sufficiently data-efficient for the scale of data we are capable of generating, which is typically orders of magnitude smaller than those for which many architectures were originally developed. It thus becomes important to build in our physical knowledge (e.g. symmetries) through inductive biases, e.g. through equivariant architectures.
Faculty Profile: https://engineering.cmu.edu/directory/bios/kurchinrachel.html
Graham Neubig
Associate Professor, Language Technology Institute
Research Areas:
1) Open-source large language models
2) Automatic tuning of large language models
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will help to 1) develop endto-end pipelines for effectively retrieving data and models from open-source repositories, generating data for training, and improving final model performance; 2) examine methods that can move beyond the simpler scenario of text-based machine learning models to models that can function over various modalities; 3) examine methods for learning under constraints, including constraints on training time, memory size, inference time, or fairness of the final model outcomes.
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/neubig-graham.html
Elaine Shi
Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Privacy preserving computation and AI
2) Privacy enhancing technologies (MPC, ZK proofs, PIR)
3) Scalable security
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc will be working towards making theoretical and/or practical advances and scalability issues for privacy enhancing technologies (MPC, ZK proofs, PIR)
Faculty profile:
https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/shi-elaine.html
Pingbo Tang
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research Areas:
1) Interactive learning for civil infrastructure systems Management
2) Infrastructure systems fault prognosis
3) Maintenance-aware operations of infrastructure
Intention for CBI Fellow: The postdoc is expected to not only join current efforts in human-machine interactive learning and education, but also to take an active role in shaping and leading new related research directions spanning multiple civil infrastructure operation scenarios.
Faculty profile: https://carnegiebosch.cmu.edu/fellowships/facultydirectory/bios/tang-pingbo.html