Engineering professor wins $175,000 award for potentially lifesaving research
Achuta Kadambi, an assistant electrical and computer engineering professor, received a National Science Foundation award for his research. If successful, his research could improve the technology used in search and rescue missions. (Courtesy of UCLA Newsroom)
A UCLA professor earned a National Science Foundation award for research that could improve the technology used in search and rescue missions, according to a university press release Thursday.
Achuta Kadambi, an electrical and computer engineering professor, received the foundation’s $175,000 Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award March 15.
If successful, Kadambi’s research would be able to help emergency responders find survivors in natural disasters who might be obscured by smoke or fire. His research focuses on robotics and computational vision, as well as finding ways to search through biological tissue using imaging technology.
Kadambi, who was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for science this past year, is also the leader of UCLA’s Visual Machines Group, which aims to give robots visual capabilities through the intersection of optical physics and deep learning, a subset of machine learning.
In addition to leading the research group, Kadambi teaches classes on computational imaging, computer vision and digital image processing to undergraduate and graduate students.
Kadambi joined the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science after earning his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became an assistant professor in 2018.
