Robi Polikar

Robi Polikar is Professor and Department Head of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rowan University's Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering from Iowa State University. His research develops fundamental computational intelligence approaches for machine learning challenges in nonstationary environments, adversarial settings, and biomedical applications.

Polikar's impactful research areas include adversarial machine learning defenses, incremental learning algorithms for streaming data, ensemble-based systems for imbalanced datasets, and applications to metagenomic classification. He directs the Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition Laboratory (SPPRL) where his group studies concept drift, missing data problems, and high-content screening.

His publication record demonstrates sustained innovation in adaptive learning systems, with recent advances in adversarial robustness for continual learners, incremental bioinformatics algorithms, and noise-resistant classification. His research has applications in healthcare diagnostics, transportation analytics, and security systems.

Honors include the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Best Paper Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Rowan University Research Achievement Award. He has graduated 16 PhD students who now hold positions in academia and industry.