Kourosh Vali

Email: kvali [at] ucdavis [dot] edu

Linkedin : /in/kvali7

Github: /kvali7

Twitter: @kourosh_vali

Google Scholar




About me:

I am Kourosh Vali, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department under the supervision of Prof. Soheil Ghiasi. I received my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tabriz in 2018. I joined the Laboratory for Embedded and Programmable Systems at UC Davis later that year, where I am a Graduate Student Researcher ever since.


Research experience:

My research is on designing Embedded software system solutions for health applications. I’m currently leading the Transabdominal Fetal pulse-Oximetry system (TFO) project, where I mainly focus on system design, signal processing, and machine learning to estimate blood oxygen saturation.


Leadership experience:

I was a co-lead of the “Storx Technologies” team at the 2022 BigBang! business competition, alongside Regina Hoang, an MBA candidate at UC Davis. Storx Technologies has developed a non-invasive medical device that accurately detects babies’ oxygen levels in the womb to determine their well-being.
The annual Big Bang! Business Competition provides a forum for innovators across California to collaborate, develop and test business ideas—and compete for $90,000 in cash prizes.

We won the First Place Award totaling $20000 in this competition for the best innovation.
https://innovate.ucdavis.edu/news/2022-big-bang-winners


TA experience:

EEC 284 Optimization of Embedded Computing Systems
EEC 172 Embedded Systems
EEC 018 Digital systems design
EEC 007 Introduction to C and microcontrollers
EEC 001 Introduction to Electrical & Computer Engineering

A cool project by my smart students for EEC 172 final project:
Air Instrument


Internship experience:
Storx Technologies Summer 2023


Research Interests:

  • Machine Learning
  • Embedded Systems
  • Data Analysis in Health Applications
  • Data Science
  • Signal Processing
  • Hardware and Software Co-Design
  • System Design and Optimization
  • Internet of Things

Publications:

  1. Begum Kasap, Kourosh Vali, Weitai Qian, Lihong Mo, Zahabiya H. Chithiwala, Anna C. Curtin, Soheil Ghiasi, and Herman L. Hedriana. “Transcutaneous Discrimination of Fetal Heart Rate from Maternal Heart Rate: A Fetal Oximetry Proof-of-Concept,” Reproductive Sciences. (2024).
  2. Kourosh Vali, Ata Vafi, Begum Kasap, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Bass: Safe deep tissue optical sensing for wearable embedded systems,” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems 22, 5s, Article 122 (October 2023), 2023.
  3. Begum Kasap, Kourosh Vali, Weitai Qian, Mahya Saffarpour, Randall Fowler, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Robust Fetal Heart Rate Tracking through Fetal Electrocardiography (ECG) and Photoplethysmography (PPG) Fusion,” 45th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 2023.
  4. Ata Vafi, Kourosh Vali, Begum Kasap, Jonathon C. Hu, Eric A. Kurzrock, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Towards non-invasive bladder volume sensing via bio-impedance spectroscopy: Feasibility demonstration in ex-vivo bladder models,” ACM/IEEE 11th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2023.
  5. Mahya Saffarpour, Debraj Basu, Fatemeh Radaei, Kourosh Vali, Jason Y. Adams, Chen-Nee Chuah, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Physiowise: A physics-aware approach to dicrotic notch identification,” ACM Trans. Comput. Healthcare, 4(2), APR 2023.
  6. Begum Kasap, Kourosh Vali, Weitai Qian, Lihong Mo, Zahabiya H. Chithiwala, Herman L. Hedriana, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Use of a novel transabdominal fetal pulse oximeter (TFO) in human pregnancy: A proof-of-concept,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Volume 228, Issue 1, Supplement, 2023, Page S100.
  7. Weitai Qian, Kourosh Vali, Begum Kasap, Christopher D. Pivetti, Christina M. Theodorou, Edwin S. Kulubya, Kaeli J. Yamashiro, Aijun Wang, Herman L. Hedriana, Diana Lee Farmer, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Continuous transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry (TFO) in pregnant ewe models under induced fetal hypoxia,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Volume 228, Issue 1, Supplement, 2023, Pages S242-S243.
  8. Begum Kasap, Kourosh Vali, Weitai Qian, Mahya Saffarpour, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Kubai: Sensor fusion for non-invasive fetal heart rate tracking,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2023.
  9. Kourosh Vali, Begum Kasap, Weitai Qian, Ata Vafi, Mahya Saffarpour, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Estimation of Fetal Blood Oxygen Saturation from Transabdominally Acquired Photoplethysmogram Waveform,” 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 2021.
  10. Begum Kasap, Kourosh Vali, Weitai Qian, Wai Ho Chak, Ata Vafi, Naoki Saito, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Multi-Detector Signal Extraction Method for Transabdominal Fetal Pulse Oximetry,” 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2021.
  11. Mahya Saffarpour, Debraj Basu, Fatemeh Radaei, Kourosh Vali, Jason Y Adams, Chen-Nee Chuah, Soheil Ghiasi, “Dicrotic notch identification: A generalizable hybrid approach under arterial blood pressure (ABP) curve deformations,” 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 2021.
  12. Begum Kasap, Kourosh Vali, Weitai Qian, Herman Hedriana, Aijun Wang, Diana Farmer, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Towards Noninvasive Accurate Detection of Intrapartum Fetal Hypoxic Distress,” 2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN) – Special Session: New Technologies for the Future of Prenatal Health, 2021.
  13. Kourosh Vali, Begum Kasap, Weitai Qian, Christina M. Theodorou, Tailai Lihe, Daniel D. Fong, Christopher D. Pivetti, Edwin Kulubya, Kaeli Yamashiro, Aijun Wang, M. Austin Johnson, Herman L. Hedriana, Diana L. Farmer, Soheil Ghiasi, “974 Non-invasive Transabdominal Assessment of In-Utero Fetal Oxygen Saturation in a Hypoxic Lamb Model,” American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Volume 224, Issue 2, Supplement, 2021, Page S604.
  14. Christina M Theodorou, Kaeli J Yamashiro, Edwin S Kulubya, Christopher D. Pivetti, Sarah C Stokes, Jordan E Jackson, Kourosh Vali, Zachary J Paxton, Rachel M Russo, Matthew Alexander, Diana L Farmer, Soheil Ghiasi, M Austin Johnson, “656 Fetal hypoxia induced by partial maternal aortic occlusion is tolerated in a lamb model,” American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Volume 224, Issue 2, Supplement, 2021, Page S412.
  15. Daniel D. Fong, Kaeli J. Yamashiro, Kourosh Vali, Laura A. Galganski, Jameson Thies, Rasta Moeinzadeh, Christopher Pivetti, André Knoesen, Vivek J. Srinivasan, Herman L. Hedriana, Diana L. Farmer, M. Austin Johnson, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Design and In Vivo Evaluation of a Non-invasive Transabdominal Fetal Pulse Oximeter,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2020.
  16. Daniel D. Fong, Kourosh Vali, Soheil Ghiasi, “Contextually-aware Fetal Sensing in Transabdominal Fetal Pulse Oximetry,”  ACM/IEEE 11th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2020.
  17. Daniel D. Fong, Kaeli J. Yamashiro, M. Austin Johnson, Kourosh Vali, Laura A. Galganski, Christopher D. Pivetti, Diana L. Farmer, Herman L. Hedriana, Soheil Ghiasi, “Validation of a novel transabdominal fetal oximeter in a hypoxic fetal lamb model,” Reproductive Sciences, 2020.
  18. Daniel D. Fong, Kaeli Yamashiro, M. Austin Johnson, Kourosh Vali, Laura Galganski, Christopher Pivetti, Diana Farmer, Herman Hedriana, Soheil Ghiasi, “98 Validation of a Novel Transcutaneous Fetal Oximeter in a Hypoxic Fetal Sheep Model,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Volume 222, Issue 1, Supplement, 2020, Page S80.
  19. Daniel D. Fong, Vivek J. Srinivasan, Kourosh Vali, and Soheil Ghiasi, “Optode Design Space Exploration for Clinically-robust Non-invasive Fetal Oximetry,” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), Volume 18, 2019.

Other Projects:

  1. COVID-19 cases in the US and social-distancing measures (Supervised by Prof. James Sharpnack – STA 208)
    • We used the social-distancing data provided by SafeGraph, and Designed ANN models to predict the actual incident rate (# cases per 100,000 people) in the last two weeks with the MAE of 71 cases on the COVID-19 US daily count data for each state. We could also anticipate 15 out of the top 20 states with the highest incident rate changes after this period.
  2. Predicting Length of Stay for Patients in ICU (Supervised by Prof. Soheil Ghiasi – EEC 289Q)
    • We explored the Machine learning models to predict the length of stay of a patient using the initial information and diagnosis to help resource allocation to ICU patients using the MIMIC-III dataset. The best result was achieved with an ANN with one hidden layer and 100 parameters. The model could predict the length of stay with the MAE of 137.82 hours.
  3. Neural Decoding of a Rodent on a rotating platform (Supervised by Prof. Karen Moxon – MAE 289)
    • An implementation of the Kalman filter estimation for neural decoding of a rat’s limbs tilted on a platform by having the Ground Reaction Forces of the platform. We found out that the best estimator decoded the activity of Limb 3 for fast clockwise rotations of the rat with 5ms bin sizes with the MSE of 10.7.
  4. A CUDA-based Batcher-Banyan Network for Bitonic Sort (Supervised by Prof. John Owens – EEC 289Q)
    • We described the Batcher-Banyan sorting network, a type of bitonic mergesort on the CUDA library. This sorting algorithm uses Butterfly and Shuffle blocks for this task. By implementing these blocks in the GPU shared memory space, we could improve upon the throughput of Radix sort by an average of over 60 % in sorting less than 213 random elements.
  5. Enhancing Sentimental Analysis of User Reviews on BERT (Supervised by Prof. Ilias Tagkopoulos – ECS 289G)
    • We Improved the Sentimental Analysis of the movie reviews of the IMDb Dataset on the Google BERT NLP model using Transfer Learning. We employed a Large number of location reviews from the YELP Dataset to refine the reviews’ predictions. We managed to increase the AUC by 0.5% to 89.3%.
  6. TD Learning to Find Car Control Policy (Supervised by Prof. Robert Cui – EEC 289A)
    • We employed TD learning to train a graphically-simulated car to navigate through a closed track. The prior information is updated in each step from the distances from the walls and the car’s speed. The best performance was observed with 64 step TD learning and after 200 episodes of training and manages to circulate an average of 3 laps on the track with no collision.
  7. Improving a Panoptic Image Segmentation Model (Supervised by Prof. Zhi Ding – EEC 206)
    • We investigated an algorithm to merge the DeepLab V2 Semantic Image Segmentation model and the MaskRCNN ResNet Instance Image Segmentation model to define the Panoptic Image Segmentation model and achieved a Panoptic Quality score of 38.1. This project won the competition in a poster presentation at UC Davis.
  8. Speech English Accent Transformation (Supervised by Prof. Zhi Ding – EEC 201)
    • We developed an algorithm to classify the speech sounds of spoken British, Midwestern, and Western Accents with 88.14% accuracy and Transform them into the accent of interest by mapping the Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients and tuning with Dynamic Time Warping. The final speech is Synthesized using LPC vocoders.
  9. Real-time Heart Rate Sensing of two persons (Supervised by Prof. Soheil. Ghiasi – EEC 284)
    • We developed an embedded software system to detect and differentiate two person’s heartbeat with a single sensor on an ARM microcontroller. The reliability of the system was improved by reducing flicker noise from the system through Synchronous Detection.
  10. Ball tracking using a monocular camera on a robotic arm (supervised by Prof. Ghader Karimian)
    • We implemented an algorithm to track a ball and catch it with a single USB webcam attached to a robotic arm based on Kalman Filters on Raspberry Pi. This improves ball detection and tracking speed 3x over hough transform.
  11. Path follower robot with a webcam on Raspberry PI (supervised by Prof. Ghader Karimian)
    • We Designed a robot to trail a path with a USB webcam on Raspberry Pi in real-time.
  12. The UART module implemented on an Altera FGPA (supervised by Prof. Ghader Karimian)
    • We implemented the UART protocol on an FPGA that allows for various baud rates, data bits, and parity control.

2238 Kemper Hall
One Shields Avenue, University of California Davis
Davis, CA
95616.