Boston University Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

MIT Technology Review features Professor Ayse Coskun and her work as Chief Scientist with Emerald AI in a recent article examining solutions to the data center energy use problem: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/16/1138591/data-center-online-quickly-electric-grid-flex/

"Of all the approaches to flexibility, Emerald AI’s may be the most ambitious: asking data centers to dial into the grid’s needs. The company’s Conductor software, which can run on premises or in the cloud, builds on the research of chief scientist Coskun. Her group at Boston University showed in a pair of 2013 papers that a data center could watch the grid and help balance big power fluctuations, such as the intermittent effects of solar and wind power. By 2022, she and her colleagues had tested their methods on a cluster of 36 research servers and shown that the system could respect power limits without breaking the processes it was running."

Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex. As the data-center boom puts pressure on the grid, some companies say the answer isn’t just more power plants but software that dials down centers’ energy-guzzling ways when demand spikes.

Professor Gianluca Stringhini is a respected authority on a variety of forms of online misinformation, malicious activity, and systems security. While serving as Program Chair for the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in 2025, he began to notice a growing problem: the conference paper submissions were riddled with fabricated citations.

With the ever-increasing flood of submissions, it was an overwhelming challenge for peer reviewers ... so Stringhini built an open-source tool to address the problem. https://www.bu.edu/eng/2026/06/17/fictional-bibliographies/

Spotlight on ECE researchers honored with this year's Hariri Institute Fellowships & Focused Research Program Awards! https://www.bu.edu/eng/2026/06/16/cultivating-computational-excellence/

Distinguished Professor of Engineering Siddharth Ramachandran has been selected as one of the 2026 IPC Plenary Speakers. In this role, he will share his innovative technical contributions and applications throughout the conference, which is set to take place on November 8-12 in Denver, Colorado. https://ieee-ipc.org/

This week, members of one of the 2026 ECE Senior Design Teams, GOFR: Grocery Operations & Fulfillment Robot, had a great time attending the Capstone Design Conference in College Station, TX! Team members as pictured in the first photo, L-R: Pree Simphliphan, Xingjian Jiang, Thien Bach Nguyen, and Darren Sajino.

They even ran into Bryan Sellers of SICK Sensor Intelligence, one of the conference sponsors! In addition to being chosen to participate this week, GOFR were also finalists in this year's SICK Challenge. They enjoyed reconnecting, and all the networking opportunities with companies and fellow recent engineering grads!

Congratulations to Donglin Liu '28, winner of a 2026 Boston University Provost's Scholars Award for Academic Exploration. The award recognizes an accomplished student who has demonstrated commitment to intellectual growth in the first two years of their undergraduate program.

The award carries funding to support a particular project; in this case, Liu plans to fund necessary materials for a synthetic biology project conducted with the mentorship of Professor Douglas Densmore.

Looking back at another incredible academic year, our department has many student achievements to celebrate! https://www.bu.edu/eng/2026/05/29/a-legacy-of-excellence/

Charlie Van Hook ‘26 had a clear goal in mind with his winning project entry for this year’s College of Engineering Dean’s Imagineering Competition: develop a sensory display for the visually impaired which would be both functional and financially accessible, unlike currently-available commercial products.

Read all about this excellent example of Societal Engineering in action: https://www.bu.edu/eng/2026/05/28/beyond-visionary/

In a recent publication in Nature Methods, the prolific Professor Ji-Xin Cheng envisions the creation of “a high-resolution chemical cellular atlas” of living organisms, providing scientists and medical practitioners with an accessible map of the smallest building blocks that make up the complex edifice of life itself. The paper describes a novel methodology which represents a promising step in the direction of realizing that ambitious goal, with the support of a MIRA grant from the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences and a Small Business Innovation Research Award.

Read more: https://www.bu.edu/eng/2026/05/28/mapping-the-internal/

Congratulations to Professor David Starobinski and ECE alum Jonathan Chamberlain (Ph.D. '25) on winning the Best Technical Paper, Runner Up, at IEEE DySPAN 2026! https://dyspan2026.ieee-dyspan.org/ieee-dyspan-2026-best-paper-awards