Our Team
At the Security, Privacy, and Intelligence for Edge Devices (SPEED) Lab, our vision is to drive transformative research in the domain of federated learning, large language models, vision-language models, cybersecurity, and multi-modality. We aspire to pioneer advancements that redefine the boundaries of AI and machine learning, while ensuring the security and privacy of distributed and decentralized systems. Through our interdisciplinary research, we aim to build robust, efficient, and intelligent solutions that empower robust and secure decision-making in edge environments, fostering innovation that benefits society in an increasingly interconnected world.
Lab Director
Assistant Professor (Tenure-track )
Ahmed Imteaj is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and the founding director of the Security, Privacy, and Intelligence for Edge Devices Lab (www.speedlab.network). Imteaj received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Florida International University in 2022 with the prestigious FIU Real Triumph Graduate Award and received his MS in Computer Science from FIU with the recognition of the Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate award. Prior to that, he received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology. His research interests encompass Federated Learning, Visual-Language Models (VLMs), Large-Language Models (LLMs), Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, and Multi-modality. Application domains include safe and smart cities, transportation networks, healthcare, and energy systems. Since joining SIUC in Fall 2022, Dr. Imteaj has secured two federal grants—NSF CRII and DHS CINA, was recognized with the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award and developed two new courses on Generative AI. Imteaj has published more than 70 refereed journal and conference papers, and book chapters. He is the recipient of the best paper award from “2019 IEEE Conference on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence” and the lead author of the book, "Foundations of Blockchain: Theory and Applications".
Ph.D. Students
Research Thesis/Project: Trustworthy and Communication Efficient Federated Learning
Masters Students
Research Thesis/Project: Computer Vision, LLMs, UAVs
Research Thesis/Project: Identification of Violent Scene from Human Action and Pose Estimation
Research Thesis/Project: Developing Large Language Models for Personalized Applications
Research Thesis/Project: Efficient Fine-tuning of Large-Language Models
Research Thesis/Project: Physics Informed Neural Networks
Research Thesis/Project: Crime Analytics with Advanced Machine Learning
SPEED Lab Alumni
Research Thesis/Project: Audio Processing, Federated LEarning.
Research Thesis/Project: Cybersecurity and Pattern recorgnition.
Research Thesis/Project: Predicting Road Traffic through Federated Learning with Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Data
Research Thesis/Project: Assessing Vulnerability in Variational Autoencoder GANs
Research Thesis/Project: Intrusion Detection with Federated Reinforcement Learning
Research Thesis/Project: Skin Cancer Detection through Transfer Learning Algorithm
Research Thesis/Project: Drone Swarming, Distributed Streaming and Learning