FSU Department of Computer Science faculty Dr. Xiaonan Zhang has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award with $600,000 in funding for her project, “CAREER: Toward Scalable and Resilient Collaborative Inference for Edge Intelligence through Network-Aware Design.” The NSF CAREER Award is NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who demonstrate excellence in research and education. Zhang’s project focuses on enabling fast and privacy-sensitive AI services that can run closer to users, such as on smartphones, wearable devices, connected cameras, and nearby computing systems, instead of relying on distant cloud servers. As AI models become increasingly complex, the project explores how these devices can work together to support collaborative inference, allowing them to jointly run AI tasks that may be too demanding for any single device. It rethinks wireless networks not just as communication channels, but as a way to help devices coordinate AI model execution and share computing and memory resources for efficient and resilient collaborative inference. This work could support applications such as mobile and digital health, distributed robotics, intelligent transportation systems, and other real-time intelligent services. The award also supports student training, hands-on learning, and research mentoring in AI, systems, and networking. Award Page