The SIGNALS Research Lab

On October 29, 2026, our school held a small conference for Innovation Day, where two of our amazing lab members presented their research. Both did a great job, and it was an absolutely wonderful experience to speak about their research with colleagues from nearby colleges and from other departments. The posters presented were:

• Bayan Ahmad presented Foundations for Generalizing Cortical Current Density Predictions From High-Density EEG Using Gradient Boosted Decision Trees.
• Maria Leyba Mesa presented A Multimodal Deep Network for Parkinson’s Disease Assessment from Handwriting Kinematics and Visual Task Traces.

Members of our lab recently traveled to Ohio State University to present their work at the Ohio Academy of Science Annual Meeting 2026. Three of our researchers shared their projects:

• Bayan Ahmad presented Foundations for Generalizing Cortical Current Density Predictions From High-Density EEG Using Gradient Boosted Decision Trees.
• Maria Leyba Mesa presented A Multimodal Deep Network for Parkinson’s Disease Assessment from Handwriting Kinematics and Visual Task Traces.
• Rachael Amira Brimm presented Explainable AI and EEG for Cognitive Load Monitoring in Pediatric Language Therapy.

All three did an outstanding job communicating their research. The meeting was a great experience, with inspiring speakers and panelists, and a chance to talk with other researchers about our current work. It was also valuable to step outside the Akron-Cleveland area, see what other schools are working on, and represent the University of Akron Biomedical Engineering Department.

We’re delighted to share that Dr. Barkana attended the International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC) in Toronto, Canada, held July 26-30, 2026. She had the wonderful opportunity to present her outstanding research, “High-Sensitivity Detection and Quantification of Entotic Cell-in-Cell Structures in Cancer Histopathology Using YOLOv8 and Geometric Reasoning.”

It was a fantastic conference to attend, filled with inspiring discussions and connections with fellow researchers. We’re so proud to have had the chance to share our work with the global community and can’t wait to see where these conversations lead next!

At CoDIT 2026, Bayan Ahmad presented her work, “Comparing the Neural and Behavioral Outcomes of Fine and Gross Motor Language Intervention in Children with DLD: An Exploratory Study,” in the Signal Processing Session, while Maria Valentina Leyba Mesa presented her work, “Compact ResNet18 with Test-Time Adaptation: Balancing Accuracy and Latency for Parkinson’s Disease Screening,” in the Image Processing Session. They both did an amazing job presenting and also helping chair sessions!