Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi Receives NSF CAREER Award

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, assistant professor of computer science at the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The CAREER award is a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) award for early-career faculty serving as role models in research and education and leading advances in their field.

Abdu Jyothi was awarded $600,000 over five years for her project titled “Enhancing Human-AI Collaboration Toward Trustworthy Learning-Based Network Controllers.” The project focuses on developing novel explainability tools and techniques to enable effective human-AI collaboration during the design and deployment of learning-based network controllers.

“This award provides the opportunity to pursue a long-term research agenda that rethinks how we design and operate learning-based networked systems,” says Abdu Jyothi. “It enables work that bridges human intuition and AI-driven decision-making in complex systems. The award also reinforces my commitment to mentoring students and cultivating a research environment that integrates systems thinking, machine learning, and human-centered design.”

“My work aims to make machine learning-based network controllers, such as those used in video streaming and congestion control, more transparent and trustworthy,” she continues. “These controllers offer improved performance in the Internet’s core operations, yet they often behave as black boxes that are difficult for operators to interpret or debug.”

The project will develop explainability tools tailored to networked systems, focusing on concept-based explanations that translate complex model behavior into high-level, human-understandable insights. By integrating different forms of explanations, the research envisions a new paradigm of human-AI collaboration in network management. This will enable safer, more interpretable, and more adaptive AI-driven infrastructures that operators can trust and effectively manage.

“This project sits at the intersection of systems, machine learning, and human-centered AI,” explains Abdu Jyothi. “I’m especially excited about the opportunity to work closely with industry partners and students to translate these ideas into practice. Ultimately, this work aims to make AI a collaborator and not just an automated optimizer in the design and operation of large-scale networked systems.”

– Tonya Becerra