Farshad Khorrami, Julian Togelius named as IEEE Fellows

Two faculty members of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering have been elevated to Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional association. 

Farshad Khorrami, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been recognized for contributions to adaptive nonlinear control and applications to robotics, unmanned systems, and cyber-physical systems. Julian Togelius, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, was selected for his contributions to procedural content generation and artificial intelligence in video games.  

“The elevation of Farshad Khorrami and Julian Togelius to the status of IEEE Fellow is a well-earned recognition of their scholarship and it’s impact across academia and industry,” said Juan De Pablo, Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology at NYU and Executive Dean of NYU Tandon. “They join a long list of Tandon faculty members who have been recognized by the IEEE for their important research, and we are proud to call them colleagues. I am confident that they will continue to build upon their impressive bodies of work in the future.”

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred to members with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Each year’s class does not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total Institute membership.

Khorrami is the Director of the Control/Robotics Research Laboratory, established in 1989 and Co-Director of Center for AI and Robotics at NYU Abu Dhabi. His lab has been on the cutting edge of robotics research, with specific focuses on nonlinear control and large-scale systems, automation, autonomous vehicles, machine learning, and cyber-physical systems security. 

His recent work includes several projects on cyber-physical system security, machine learning security, robotics, and hardware security funded by ONR, ARO, NSF, DARPA, and DOE.  Some ongoing projects include Tracking Real-time Anomalies in Power Systems (TRAPS)  and Digital Twin for Security and Code Verification (DISCOVER) to detect vulnerabilities of devices and secure the power grid cyber-physical systems. Khorrami is also working on a tool called DECODE that turns complex robotics and control systems' software back into understandable math formulas. Khorrami is a member of the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT).

“Since I first joined Poly (before it was NYU), the school has been very fortunate in having highly illustrious faculty in the system theory and control area, all of whom have gone on to be recognized as IEEE Fellows” said Khorrami.  “It is an honor to be among them”

Togelius is the Director of the Game Innovation Lab, where he researches game AI, player modelling, procedural content generation, automatic game design, believable bot behavior, and evolutionary computation. He also co-founded modl.ai, a startup focused on AI-driven gameplay and game testing, and was previously the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games, and

The game innovation lab is a hotbed of research into how games can help deep neural networks learn and how AI can help game developers automate expensive and time-consuming aspects of game development — and make new types of games possible. The researcher’s work on how to use automatic generation of gameplay and levels to create more general game playing has put the Togelius at the vortex of a virtuous cycle: smarter, more flexible machine learning systems that can play games can also help design them level by level, as well as personalize the playing experience for each player in real-time and automatically generate content.

“I am honored to be in such a select company, and I am particularly happy to get this recognition from IEEE, which plays a key role for the AI and games research community” said Togelius. “I’m going to celebrate by writing a bunch of overdue paper reviews.”