Talk Title: “The Case Against Scale: Rethinking Video-based ML in the Age of Small Data”

Bio: Professor Ostadabbas is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University (NU) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She joined NU in 2016 after completing her post-doctoral research at Georgia Tech, following the achievement of her PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2014. At NU, Professor Ostadabbas holds the roles of Director at the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab), and the Director of Women in Engineering (WIE). Her research focuses on the convergence of computer vision and machine learning, particularly emphasizing representation learning in visual perception problems. In her applied research, she has significantly contributed to the understanding, detection, and prediction of human and animal behaviors through the modeling of visual motion, considering various biomechanical factors. Professor Ostadabbas also extends her work to the Small Data Domain, including applications in medical and military fields, where data collection and labeling are costly and protected by strict privacy laws. Her solutions involve deep learning frameworks that operate effectively with limited labeled training data, incorporate domain knowledge for prior learning and synthetic data augmentation, and enhance the generalization of learning across domains by acquiring invariant representations. Professor Ostadabbas has co-authored over 140 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and received research awards from prestigious institutions such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense (DoD), Sony, Mathworks, Amazon AWS, Verizon, Oracle, Biogen, and NVIDIA. She has been honored with the NSF CAREER Award (2022), Sony Faculty Innovation Award (2023), winner of Cade Prize for Inventivity in the Technology category (2024), was the runner-up for the Oracle Excellence Award (2023), and One of the 120+ Women Spearheading Advances in Visual Tech and AI Recognized by LDV Capital (2024). She is also elected as a Faculty Fellow and the recipient of the Constantinos Mavroidis Translational Research Award from the NU’s College of Engineering in 2025. She served in the organization committees of many workshops and renowned conferences (such as CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, WACV, ICIP, ICCASP, BioCAS, CHASE, ICHI) in various roles including Lead/Co-Lead Organizer, Program Chair, Board Member, Publicity Co-Chair, Session Chair, Technical Committee, and Mentor.