ISE Seminar Series - Houshang Darabi

Adapting to the AI-Driven World: Lessons from Research and Education Projects 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming every aspect of human life, with no sign of slowing down. Two main functions performed by higher education institutions, namely education and research, are directly affected by AI. Universities now face the question of how to adapt their core functions to this new AI-driven environment. The speaker presents a systematic perspective on this adaptation and draws on his experience as a PI on two current federally funded projects in healthcare engineering and occupational safety areas to show how the application systems in these projects are undergoing this adaptation.


Bio: Houshang Darabi is Professor and Head of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research centers on the theory and application of artificial intelligence in healthcare engineering, safety engineering, and education systems. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Houshang Darabi serves on the National Academies Standing Committee on Personal Protective Equipment and directs the Targeted Research Training Program at the Great Lakes Center for Occupational Health and Safety, where his team develops AI-driven educational and research tools for the occupational safety community. His research team pioneered the LSTM-FCN and Multivariate LSTM-FCN architectures for time-series classification. These architectures have been widely adopted by researchers worldwide for advanced clinical applications, including automated ECG detection of cardiac arrhythmias, EEG-based epileptic seizure prediction, sleep stage classification, and monitoring of Parkinson's disease progression using physiological biomarkers.