Marco Levorato Wins Emerging Innovator of Year Award

For each of the past five years, UC Irvine’s Beall Applied Innovation Center has recognized researchers with its Innovator Awards, celebrating those working to move inventions from the lab to the market for the benefit of humankind. This year, Marco Levorato, a professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), received the 2023 UCI Early Career/Emerging Innovator of Year Award for his efforts to “drive innovative research into socially and commercially important applications.” The award comes with $5,000 in funding.

Innovative Research to Support Mobile AI
When it comes to developing AI for mobile applications, mobile devices don’t have the capacity to execute complex algorithms or offer multiple functionalities at the same time. To address this, algorithms are often executed on a server elsewhere, but this requires sending data, which can lead to potential security concerns.

“When you transport the data, you’re very vulnerable, but if do everything locally, then you end up with an extremely costly platform,” says Levorato. “So, most of the research that I’ve done in the last five years is about trying to solve this dilemma between transporting data and executing locally.”

In particular, he has been working to develop technologies that can execute algorithms in a distributed fashion across multiple devices, compressing information and adapting the algorithm for maximum efficiency and resiliency. Such technologies have potential for many different applications.

Market Discovery Process
Levorato has been partnering with the UCI Beall Applied Innovation Center through its I-Corps program focused on market discovery. “We have seen a lot of traction in terms of industry and agencies being interested in our research,” he says. “We are exploring applications in traffic monitoring and consumer electronics, as well as in the defense space — in particular, lightweight drones for recognition and surveillance.”

He stresses that identifying potential markets is much different from conducting research. “In research, we always look at these very general settings, but if you want to create a commercial product, you need to be a lot more specific,” he says. “So this award is connected to my efforts to commercialize some of my technologies focused on distributed and flexible computer vision and navigation, ensuring they work in a real-world environment.”

— Shani Murray