About the AI Things Laboratory
The AI Things Laboratory at the University of Central Florida Computer Science department pursues projects that intend to make the physical and virtal objects we are interacting with more intelligent, connected and attuned with the needs and preferences of the users. We focus not only on raw performance, but also take into account considerations of privacy, fairness and energy efficiency.
Our projects range from machine learning foundations to practical applications in assistive robotics, smart medical devices, smart homes and environments.
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News
- October 2025: Congratulations to recent AIThings lab alumni Saad Almohaimeed for the acceptance of the paper "Towards Generalizable Generic Harmful Speech Datasets for Implicit Hate Speech Detection", by Saad Almohaimeed, Saleh Almohaimeed, Damla Turgut and Ladislau Bölöni to the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL 2025), 2025. A preprint of the paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16476
- June 2025: Happy to share that the paper "GDM-Net++: multi-robot 2D and 3D gas distribution mapping via deep Q-learning and gaussian process regression" by I. Kulbaka, A. Dutta, P. Kreidl, L. Bölöni and S. Roy was accepted as an oral presentation at the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025), October 19-25, 2025 in Hangzhou, China.
- March 2024: The source code for our paper Samuel Matloob, Ayan Dutta, O. Patrick Kreidl, Damla Turgut and Ladislau Bölöni. Exploring the tradeoffs between systematic and random exploration in mobile sensors. In Proc. of 26th. Int. Conf. on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM-2023), pp. 209-216, October 2023. is now available at https://github.com/AIThings/GridLimitedRandomness-MSWIM-2023
- July 2021: Congratulations to Safa Salil Bacanli for defending his dissertation "Unmnanned Aerial Vehicle Usage in Opportunistic Networks" for the degree of PhD. in Computer Science.
- July 2021: Congratulations to Siavash Khodadedeh for defending his dissertation "Unsupervised meta-learning" for the degree of PhD. in Computer Science.
- February 2021: Congratulations to Damla Turgut for being selected as "Distinguished Member" of the 2021 INFOCOM Technical Program Committee!
- February 2021: Congratulations to Damla Turgut for receiving the NCWIT 2021 Mentoring Award for Undergraduate Research (MAUR)!
- January 2021: Congratulations to the Pandemic Wave Predictor (PAWP) team that qualified to the finals of the $500K Pandemic Response Challenge sponsored by Cognizant to develop the most effective AI solution to fight COVID. The Pandemic Wave Predictor team is formed of Sharare Zehtabian, Siavash Khodadadeh and Lotzi Bölöni.
- January 2021: Congratulations to Siavash Khodadadeh, Sharare Zehtabian, Saeed Vahidian, Weijia Wang, Bill Lin and Lotzi Bölöni for the acceptance of the paper Unsupervised Meta-Learning through Latent-Space Interpolation in Generative Models to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR-2021).
- January 2021: Congratulations to Sharare Zehtabian, Siavash Khodadadeh, Lotzi Bölöni and Damla Turgut for the acceptance of the paper Modeling an intelligent controller for predictive caching in AR/VR-enabled home scenarios to the journal Pervasive and Mobile Computing.
- December 2020: Dr. Damla Turgut had been selected as a IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2021-2022.
- December 2020: Congratulatios to Siavash Khodadadeh, Sharare Zehtabian, Lotzi Bölöni and Damla Turgut for the acceptance of the paper Privacy-Preserving Learning of Human Activity Predictors in Smart Environments at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM-21). The acceptance rate was 19.9%.
- November 2020: Matteo Mendula presented the paper Interaction and Behaviour Evaluation for Smart Homes: Data Collection and Analytics in the ScaledHome Project at the 23rd International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM-2020)
- November 2020: Congratulations to Hassam Sheikh for defending his Computer Science dissertation "Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Defensive Escort Teams"!