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 serve as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering [I-SENSE] and am a senior member of the Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence [CA-AI] at FAU. In addition, 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, Computing Research Association (CRA), and ORAU Research Innovation Partnership Grant. Our research has been published in leading venues including CVPR, ACL, ICCV, AAAI, BigData, ICDCS, SenSys, Mobiquitous, ICMLA, COMPSAC, Nature, IEEE Transactions, etc.
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 VLMs and FL
- Quantum AI and Post-Quantum Security
- Computer Vision, 3D Models and Digital Twin
- Applications in Surveillance, Autonomous Vehicles and Transportation, Ocean Research, Healthcare, and Agriculture.
news
| Sep 13, 2026 | đ Received a FAU Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Grant for CoastSight! Excited to receive a FAU Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Grant for our project, âCoastSight: Generative and Vision-Language AI for Disaster Intelligence.â Led by Dr. Ahmed Imteaj, Dr. Stephanie Wakefield, and Dr. Jason O. Hallstrom, CoastSight explores Generative AI and Vision-Language Models for disaster intelligence and coastal resilience while engaging students in interdisciplinary, hands-on research. đ CoastSight Project Page   |  đď¸ FAU VIP Project Page   |  đ FAU VIP Program |
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| Sep 01, 2026 | đ Three papers accepted at EMNLP 2026! Two papers have been accepted to the Main Conference of EMNLP 2026 (CORE A*), with a 15.4% acceptance rate, and one paper has been accepted to the Industry Track, where 263 papers were accepted this year. đ EMNLP is ranked #2 in Computational Linguistics. đ Ranking Details |
| Aug 15, 2026 | 𧏠Our work on secure and trustworthy healthcare AI has been published in Nature Scientific Reports! Our paper titled, âSecure yet fragile: adversarial vulnerabilities of federated visionâlanguage models in medical AIâ</span> examines federated Vision-Language Models for medical AI and demonstrates how adversarial perturbations introduced at one participating site can propagate through collaborative training and substantially degrade the shared modelâs performance. đŹ Read the Paper in Scientific Reports đ° FAU Institute News: âSecure Yet Fragile: Privacy-Preserving Healthcare AI Remains Vulnerable to Cyberattacksâ |
| Jun 30, 2026 | đ¤ Invited Talk at the NAIRR Pilot Classroom Expansion Conference! Invited to speak at the NAIRR Pilot Classroom Expansion Conference in Orlando on âIntegrating Modern AI into the Curriculum: LLMs, Multimodal Systems, and Practice.â The talk highlighted practical approaches for bringing LLMs, multimodal AI, and hands-on AI learning into computing education. đ° Read the I-SENSE News Feature |
| Apr 30, 2026 | Awarded the 2026 NSF CISE REU Grant through Computing Research Association (CRA). Thanks CRA! I am currently looking for 1 motivated undergraduate student to join an exciting research project on Vision-Language Models. đ Competitive stipend + fully supported conference travel |
| Apr 20, 2026 | Our paper, âNo Innocence in Styling: Discovery of Privacy Protection Capabilities and Security Risks in Consumer Generative AI Writing Assistantsâ, has been accepted in the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) Industry Track!. |
| Apr 06, 2026 | Our paper, âSecure Yet Fragile: Adversarial Vulnerabilities of Federated VisionâLanguage Models in Medical AIâ, has been accepted in the Nature Scientific Reports Journal (Impact Factor: 3.9)!. |
| Mar 24, 2026 | Serving as a Reviewer for NeurIPS 2026 and ECCV 2026, and served as a Reviewer for CVPR 2026. |
| Mar 23, 2026 | Our paper, âBreaking Sensor-Text Alignment: Cross-Modal Attack on Contrastive Multimodal Human Activity Recognitionâ, has been accepted in the CVPR 2026 (SoS Workshop)!. |
| Mar 20, 2026 | IJCNN 2026 Paper Accepted! Our paper, âSim-CLIP: Unsupervised Siamese Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Robust and Semantically-Rich Vision-Language Modelsâ, has been accepted in the Main Track of the IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2026) (Ranked A CS Conference). đ Project Page |
| Feb 20, 2026 | CVPR 2026 Paper Accepted! Our paper, âWhen Data is Scarce, Learn to Adapt: Robust Federated Learning via Adversarial Meta-Optimizationâ, has been accepted in the Findings Track of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026) (Ranked #1 CS Conference). đ Project Page |
| Feb 16, 2026 | Serving as Area Chair and Session Organizing Chair at the IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2026). |
| Jan 01, 2026 | Our project proposal presentation and project demo titled, âARMOR-HAL: Unified Defense for Adversarial Robustness and Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Modelsâ have been accepted for the 2026 NSF 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 the travel support. |
| Dec 30, 2025 | Our paper, âQuantifying Robustness and Sustainability Trade-off in Federated Adversarial Learning for Cyber-Physical Systemsâ, has been published 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. đ Project Details: NAIRR250393 Â Â đ° Media Coverage: FAU I-SENSE News |
| Nov 15, 2025 | Recognized among the Top 2% Scientists Worldwide by Stanford University for research impact. đ° Media Coverage: I-SENSE News Coverage |
| Nov 14, 2025 | Our special session proposal, âDeep Neural Networks and Generative AI for Multi-Agent Smart Vehicle Perceptron, Learning, Automation and Optimizationâ, co-organized with Zhen Ni and Hepeng Li, has been accepted for inclusion in the IEEE WCCI 2026 â the worldâs largest technical event on computational intelligence. |
| Oct 20, 2025 | Appointed as the Faculty Advisor of the Google Developer Group (GDG) at Florida Atlantic University. đ Learn more |
| Oct 15, 2025 | Our paper, titled âPose to Protect: Federated Skeleton-Based Anomaly Detection for Privacy-Conscious Video Surveillanceâ, was presented at ICCV 2025 in Honolulu, Hawaii â one of the premier conferences in computer vision. |
| Sep 15, 2025 | Three papers accepted at ICMLA 2025! |
| Aug 15, 2025 | August 2025 â 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 âSLADE: Shielding against Dual Exploits in Large Vision-Language Modelsâ and âTowards Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicles with Vision-Language Models Under Targeted and Untargeted Adversarial Attacksâ, 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 Stanfordâs Top 2% Scientists List for 2023 research impact. |
| Aug 15, 2024 | Served as a panelist in the âLetâs Talk Researchâ 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. |
