Computer Science Assistant Professor Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Aug. 28, 2025) — North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University College of Engineering assistant professor Olusola Odeyomi, Ph.D., was awarded the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, one of the agency’s most prestigious honors for early-career faculty.

Odeyomi, and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science since 2022, earned the award for his research that focuses on improving federated learning, a method that enables multiple devices or organizations to train a shared machine learning model without exchanging private data.

“This is such a prestigious award, and I am grateful to NSF and the computer science department for supporting my career,” he said. “It motivates me to continue to do good research and help progress the university toward R1 status.”

The CAREER program supports promising teacher-scholars who have the potential to become academic role models and lead advances in research and education. NSF determined the project worthy of support through its intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria, advancing the Foundation’s mission to promote the progress of science.

“Federated learning has shown promise, but it faces significant challenges related to fairness, communication and privacy,” said Odeyomi. “Clients who contribute higher-quality data often do not see their efforts properly reflected in the final model, and clients who contribute low-quality data get the same final model at a lesser cost.”

Think of it as a group assignment where one student has contributed all the research and created the presentation while another student has done the bare minimum. The assignment earns the group a B-, which for the first student is not reflective of the work they put in but for the second student is a great grade.

“This award allows me to tackle the critical issues of fairness and privacy in federated learning in dynamic environments,” said Odeyomi. “By designing strategies that incentivize meaningful contributions without compromising efficiency or security and avoids monetary incentives and reduces computational burdens, we can expand the real-world applications of this technology and strengthen collaborations between academia and industry.”

The project will also establish rigorous mathematical foundations and share open-source implementations to ensure reproducibility. Partnerships with industry are expected to help translate the work into real-world applications, contributing to technological advancement and economic growth.

“This CAREER award reflects both Dr. Odeyomi’s innovative research and North Carolina A&T’s commitment to preparing leaders who drive progress in science and engineering,” said Kaushik Roy, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Computer Science.