🎖️ NSF CISE CRII Grant — $167,500 (Sole PI)

Awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant as the Sole Principal Investigator.

This project has resulted in significant research impact.

📄 Publications from this Grant

A total of 5 peer-reviewed papers, including:

🧠 CVPR 2025 — 2 papers
🌐 ICDCS 2024 — 1 paper
💻 COMPSAC 2024 — 1 paper
📡 IEEE Consumer Electronics — 1 paper

🎖️ NSF NAIRR Pilot Grant — Sole PI

Awarded the NSF National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot grant for the project:

“ARMOR-HAL: Unified Defense for Adversarial Robustness and Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models.”

This project advances secure and reliable AI systems through unified adversarial defense frameworks.

🔗 Project Details:
NSF NAIRR Pilot Award Page

🎖️ ORAU Research Innovation Partnership Grant — Lead PI

Received the ORAU Research Innovation Partnership Grant as Lead PI.

Funded by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), this program supports innovative initiatives that foster interdisciplinary collaboration across university members and domain experts.

🎖️ DHS CINA Grant (Collaboration with FIU) — SIU PI

Awarded a competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center (CINA) program.

📣 Featured in:

🏆 Academic Honors & Distinctions

🏅 Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award (2024)

Recipient of the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award (2024) from the School of Computing at Southern Illinois University, recognizing excellence in teaching, mentorship, and curriculum development.

🏅 FIU 2022 Real Triumphs Graduate Award

Recipient of the prestigious 2022 Real Triumphs Graduate Award from Florida International University.

Each commencement, FIU recognizes a select group of graduates whose academic excellence, professional promise, and perseverance distinguish them among their peers.

🎥 Watch the Recognition Video:
YouTube Clip

🎖️ View Award Details:
Official Award Announcement

🏅 University-Wide Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate Award

Recipient of the University-Wide Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate Award, presented to one master’s graduate in recognition of exceptional academic achievement, impactful research contributions, and dedicated service.

🏅 Best Paper Award — CSCI 2019

Received the Best Paper Award at CSCI 2019 for research on distributed IoT sensing and federated learning, developing scalable and privacy-preserving distributed learning frameworks.