Negar Kiyavash receives prestigious Humboldt Fellowship

CSL Associate Professor Negar Kiyavash received a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This prestigious fellowship is granted to approximately 500 applicants annually across all fields of research.

A Humboldt Research Fellowship allows highly-qualified scientists and scholars to carry out long-term research in Germany. The fellowship provided funding for Kiyavash’s sabbatical stay at the University of Munich (TUM) in Germany.

Kiyavash, associate professor of industrial and enterprise systems engineering and electrical and computer engineering and Willett Faculty Scholar, focuses her research on statistical signal processing and information theory with applications to network inference and computer, communication, and multimedia security.

Kiyavash received her PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Illinois in 2006. She received an NSF Career Award in 2011. In 2014, she received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research, an award given to professors who have been judged by their colleagues to have conducted the best research during the last academic year. For the academic year of 2016-17, Kiyavash is a Center for Advanced Study Associate, which will allow her time to pursue an individual scholarly project.

This past year, Kiyavash and her team were awarded $6.25 million from the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) to develop a new information theory for data collection, analysis, and decision-making. The research, housed in CSL, aims to speed up and improve our ability to collect and analyze data and subsequently adapt our decisions as new information comes in. Applications range from social network analysis to interactive machine learning with humans in the loop, such as brain computer/robot interfaces (BCI/BRI) or crowdsourcing.