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Research

The Big Data Analytics Program works closely with the following research centers and institutes to provide research opportunities for our BDA students.  Students can contact the directors of these center for possible volunteered research assistant opportunities or take BDA797 (Research) or BDA798 (Special Study) with the faculty in these research centers. Their contact information can be found in the BDA Faculty webpage.

Contact: Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou [email protected] or Dr. Atsushi Nara [email protected]

The Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age (HDMA) is a transdisciplinary research center that aims to enable transformative projects adopting synergetic solutions and spatiotemporal analysis methods for prominent issues in our local and global societies, such as health disparities, disease outbreaks, transportation, human movements, sustainability, etc. The research focus of the HDMA Center includes social media analytics (Twitter, Reddit, and Flickr), disease outbreak tracking (COVID-19 and flu), health disparities (Cancer and COVID-19), big data analytics, intelligent transportation, traffic safety, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), human mobility, and human communication.  

Contact: MOC-LLAB Director, Dr. Gabriela Fernandez [email protected]

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The Metabolism of Cities Living Lab (MOC-LLAB) is named after the concept of urban metabolism to view the city as a living organism. Our aim is to strengthen diversity and deliberation in climate adaptation planning, by supporting our efforts on under representative communities everywhere in declaring a vision for sustainable development that is firmly rooted in cultural diversity, equity, and justice. Using our facilities as a test bed to generate solutions, we aim to apply international instruments to demonstrate how immense inequality, racism, and discrimination are decimating the lives, aspirations, and futures of under representative communities; by focusing to develop and facilitate practical guidance on how to operationalize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) “Leave No One Behind” concept in southern California and the Baja California Mexico region.

Contact: Dr. Aaron C. Elkins [email protected]

The Artificial Intelligence Lab at SDSU engages in a wide range of theoretical and experimental research. It has been a center of excellence for Artificial Intelligence research, teaching, theory, and practice. We engage in research in the topics of augmented, virtual, & mixed reality, robotics, machine learning, human-robot interaction, and spatial computing. It supports and encourages interdisciplinary collaborations, among students and professors. 

Contact: Dr. Sergio Rey
[email protected]

The Center for Open Geographical Science launched in 2022 as a hub for open and reproducible research and a home for all things spatial. COGS combines expertise from two collaborative research labs: the lab for Spatial Analysis in the Social Sciences (SASS) and the Vegetation and Landscape Ecology (VALE) lab.

Contact: Dr. Arash Jahangiri [email protected]

The Smart Transportation Analytics Research (STAR) Lab at San Diego State University was founded in 2015 with the primary goal of improving transportation systems through a combination of research, education, and technology transfer activities.  The STAR lab’s research focuses on Transportation Safety, Driver Behavior Modeling, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Connected & Automated Vehicles, Artificial Intelligence Applications, and Evacuation Modeling. 

Contact: Dr. Xiaobai Liu [email protected]

The Computer Vision Lab focuses on the development of generic theories, unified models and powerful algorithms to address the most fundamental challenges in the area of Computer Vision. Our studies also involve topics in multiple subdisciplines of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including machine learning, cognition, multimedia computing, and computational statistics. The developed techniques have wide potentials in security surveillance, robotics, autonomous driving, and other applications. Our projects have been supported by several federal agencies, including DoD DARPA, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Office of Naval Research (ONR).

Contact: Dr. Faramarz Valafar [email protected]

The Laboratory for Pathogenesis of Clinical Drug Resistance and Persistence is located in Alvarado Medical center near San Diego State University. Lead by Professor Faramarz, the group consists of research scientists and Masters degree students from SDSU. The lab focuses on studying genetic characteristics of pathogenic drugs. The group currently is working on tuberculosis. 

Contact: Dr. Wei Wang [email protected]

The Cyber Innovation Group is dedicated to invention of new technologies in the broad telecommunication and networking areas. The current research effort is focused on designing new energy efficient wireless networking protocols to support Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia applications, developing cutting edge Internet of Things (IoTs) applications, and creating modern wearable body sensor systems for mobile healthcare. 3D Game Programming Lab supports research in Service-Learning with Game Development. Students interested in the field of Serious Games can use the PCs, Xbox360s, and Xbox Kinect systems to design and implement 3D games that benefit disciplines outside of computer science.  

Contact: Dr. Sam Shen [email protected]

The SDSU Climate Informatics Lab continuously recruit students (both graduate and undergraduate) and visitors to work on climate data analysis and visualization, climate modeling, and big data. US governmental fellowships are available to the qualified US citizens. The lab students can major in applied math, statistics, pure math, computational science, computer science, ecology, geography, or other climate-related areas. 

Contact: Dr. Luwen (Vivian) Huangfu [email protected]

AI4Business Lab is a group of active researchers in the areas: Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Text Mining, Machine Learning, and Public Health. We focused on integrating information technology and organizational processes to meet the needs of businesses and other researchers.

Contact: Dr. Qi Wang  [email protected]

The Advanced Data Assimilation Lab is a research lab in the aerospace engineering department that aims to target inverse problems in turbulent, aerodynamic flows and to interpret observation data in terms of the physical governing equations. A wide range of computational research is conducted here, from adjoint-based optimization for chaotic systems and particle-laden flow to machine-learned generative models. Our projects have been supported by several federal agencies, including DoD AFOSR, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).