Ahmed Imteaj
Assistant Professor, I-SENSE Fellow and Director of SPEED Lab
I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. I also serve as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering (I-SENSE) at FAU. Besides that, I am the Founding Director of the Secure Prediction, Edge AI and Multimodal LLM Lab [SPEED Lab].
My research focuses on building robust, secure, efficient, and trustworthy AI systems, with an emphasis on large vision-language models, agentic AI, federated learning, multimodal LLMs, and edge intelligence. I am particularly interested in control-theory of LLMs and distributed intelligence, and practical deployment in autonomous transportation, smart city, surveillance, operational intelligence for mission critical situations, underwater robot, agriculture and healthcare applications.
Our research has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot, and ORAU Research Innovation Partnership Grant. Our research has been published in leading venues including CVPR, AAAI, ICCV, BigData, ICDCS, ICMLA, COMPSAC, and IEEE Transactions.
Research Interests
- Large Vision-Language Models and Multimodal LLMs
- Federated Learning (FL) for Edge-Devices
- Trustworthy AI, Agentic AI and Cybersecurity
- Robustness and Security of LLMs and FL
- Distributed and Edge AI Systems
- Quantum AI
- Applications in Surveillance, Autonomous Vehicles and Transportation, Ocean Research, Healthcare, and Agriculture.
news
| Feb 20, 2026 | CVPR 2026 Paper Accepted Our paper, “When Data is Scarce, Learn to Adapt: Robust Federated Learning via Adversarial Meta-Optimization”, has been accepted in the Findings Track of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026) (Ranked #1 CS Conference). 🔗 Project Page |
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| Jan 01, 2026 | Our project proposal presentation and project demo have been accepted for the 2026 NAIRR Annual Meeting. I will present our research, and Md Zarif Hossain (PhD student) will present the project demonstration in Arlington, Virginia. Grateful to the NSF for travel support. |
| Dec 30, 2025 | Our paper, “Quantifying Robustness and Sustainability Trade-off in Federated Adversarial Learning for Cyber-Physical Systems”, has been accepted in IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing. |
| Dec 15, 2025 | Organized a Special Session on Robustness and Security of Large Language Models (ROSE-LLM 2025) as the Session Chair along with Dr. M. Hadi Amini (FIU) at the 24th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA 2025). |
| Dec 02, 2025 | Awarded the NSF NAIRR Pilot Resource Allocation Grant Supporting advanced research in secure and robust AI systems through the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot. 🔗 Project Details: NAIRR250393 📰 Media Coverage: FAU I-SENSE News |
| Nov 15, 2025 | Recognized among the Top 2% Scientists Worldwide by Stanford University for research impact. 🔗 I-SENSE News Coverage Our special session proposal, “Deep Neural Networks and Generative AI for Multi-Agent Smart Vehicle Perceptron, Learning, Automation and Optimization”, co-organized with Zhen Ni and Hepeng Li, has been accepted for inclusion in the IEEE WCCI 2026 — the world’s largest technical event on computational intelligence. |
| Oct 20, 2025 | Appointed as the Faculty Advisor of the Google Developer Group (GDG) at Florida Atlantic University. 🔗 Learn more |
| Oct 15, 2025 | Our paper, titled “Pose to Protect: Federated Skeleton-Based Anomaly Detection for Privacy-Conscious Video Surveillance”, was presented at ICCV 2025 in Honolulu, Hawaii — one of the premier conferences in computer vision. |
| Sep 15, 2025 | Three papers accepted at ICMLA 2025! |
| Aug 15, 2025 | August 2025 — Major Career Announcement Joined Florida Atlantic University as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and as an I-SENSE Fellow. |
| Jun 15, 2025 | CVPR 2025: Our papers, titled “SLADE: Shielding against Dual Exploits in Large Vision-Language Models” and “Towards Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicles with Vision-Language Models Under Targeted and Untargeted Adversarial Attacks”, are published in the CVPR 2025 Proceedings (Ranked #1 Computer Science Conference, 22.1% acceptance rate). Served as a reviewer for the CVPR 2025 Workshop on Distillation of Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving (WDFM-AD). |
| Feb 15, 2025 | Published a co-first authored paper in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. One paper accepted at the AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium. |
| Jan 15, 2025 | Nominated for the Early Career Faculty Excellence Award at Southern Illinois University. Launched a new interdisciplinary course on Generative AI at SIU. Served as a reviewer for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). |
| Dec 15, 2024 | Awarded the ORAU Research Innovation Partnerships Grant as Lead PI. Presented papers at IEEE BigData 2024 and IEEE ICMLA 2024. Served as a panelist for the NSF CRII Review Panel. |
| Sep 15, 2024 | Listed in Stanford’s Top 2% Scientists List for 2023 research impact. |
| Aug 15, 2024 | Served as a panelist in the “Let’s Talk Research” session, guiding early-career faculty on NSF proposal strategies. |
| Aug 15, 2024 | Selected as a recipient of the NSF CDER Grant for Distributed Computing training. |
| Jul 10, 2024 | Served on the NASA MOREP Proposal Review Panel. |
| Jul 01, 2024 | My course proposal is accepted by University Honors program and successfully developed a new course on Generative AI. |
| Jun 20, 2024 | Served on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Review Panel. |
| Apr 15, 2024 | |
| Apr 15, 2024 | Received the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award Honored and grateful to the School of Computing, Southern Illinois University for this meaningful recognition of teaching excellence and curriculum innovation. 🔗 Social Media Post: LinkedIn Announcement |
| Mar 15, 2024 | Awarded the DHS CINA Grant 🇺🇸 Grateful to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for supporting our research in AI-driven security and criminal activity recognition. Media Coverage: The Southern Illinoisan |
| Jan 30, 2024 | Our paper, titled “Securing Privacy in Cloud-Based Whiteboard Services Against Health Attribute Inference Attacks” has been published in IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. |
