Deepti Ghadiyaram, an Indian American computer scientist has become Co-Director of Artificial Intelligence Research Initiative (AIR) at the Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University. The purpose of AIR is to bring AI researchers at BU together through research seminars and other events.
Ghadiyaram, Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the College of Engineering and the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, assumed her new role on Sept. 2.
She has been a core faculty member of AIR since summer of 2024 and will co-direct with Kate Saenko, Professor of Computer Science and Founder of AIR. “Deepti’s work on computer vision gives her unique connections to many of AIR members’ research,” said Saenko.
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Ghadiyaram brings a wide range of academic and industry experience in building safe, interpretable, and robust computer vision systems to the team, according to a university release.
Prior to joining BU in 2024, Ghadiyaram was a member of technical staff at Runway and a senior research scientist at Meta AI. In addition, she has served as a program and area chair at conferences, including the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, International Conference on Computer Vision, European Conference on Computer Vision, and Neural Information Processing Systems, where she has also organized tutorials and workshops. She has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
At BU, Ghadiyaram has been recognized for her interdisciplinary work and emerging leadership in machine learning and computer vision. Her recent research ranges from reducing the inference overhead during generating videos through Swift Sampling to examining the vulnerabilities in audio-visual multi-modal language models through mechanistic interpretability.
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“I am excited for students to connect with speakers from diverse research backgrounds, while also creating a shared, interdisciplinary space for faculty and students from different departments working on AI,” said Ghadiyaram.
As Co-Director, Ghadiyaram will help bring together AIR’s interdisciplinary team of over 20 core and affiliated faculty through seminars and social events. In addition, Ghadiyaram will serve on the Hariri Institute’s Steering Committee to guide the strategic direction of the Institute.
“Deepti’s leadership, dedication to serving the greater research community, and commitment to interdisciplinary research make her a valuable addition to AIR’s team,” said Yannis Paschalidis, Director of the Hariri Institute. “We’re excited to welcome her to this new role and have her input on our Steering Committee.”