Lab updates and life at the DeCoDE Lab
August 2026
A big IDETC-CIE 2026 in Houston is coming up for the lab as we have three papers and seven additional presentations. Our FLARE paper with GE Vernova won both the CIE Best Conference Paper Award and the AI/ML Technical Committee Best Paper Award. We are also organizing the fourth "From Data to Design" workshop and a student hackathon with nTop and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
July 2026
Dr. Ahmed received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program award (selected in 2025, with the grant effective 2026).
July 2026
Dr. Ahmed was appointed to the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professorship at MIT.
July 2026
The lab presented four papers at ICML 2026, with FIRE selected as a Spotlight (top 2.2% of submissions). Earlier in April, GIT-BO was presented at ICLR 2026.
July 2026
Congratulations to Ghadi Nehme on receiving the GE Vernova Fellowship and to Rosen Yu on receiving the MathWorks Fellowship!
July 2026
On July 16, the DeCoDE Lab moved to its new home in Building 35, Room 35-332. Come visit us in our new space!
June 2026
Our AI-driven tower redesign with UPorto was adopted as the official floating tower in the IEA Wind 22-MW reference turbine repository maintained by the National Laboratory of the Rockies and DTU. See the repository.
May 2026
At Commencement, we celebrated the DeCoDE Lab's first two Ph.D. graduates, Lyle Regenwetter and Amin Heyrani Nobari. We were also proud to celebrate the MS thesis milestones of Era Syla, Brandon Man, Annie Doris, Nomi Yu, Nicholas Sung, and Aditya Palaparthi. Excited for what comes next for all of them!
May 2026
Lyle Regenwetter successfully defended his Ph.D. and will be joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor. Congratulations, Dr. Regenwetter.
May 2026
Dr. Ahmed delivered a keynote at the DESIGN 2026 conference in Cavtat, Croatia.
April 2026
Congratulations to Ghadi Nehme on receiving MIT MechE's Thomas Sheridan Award for creativity in human-machine integration!
March 2026
Our DesignQA paper received the Editor's Award from the ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering.
February 2026
DeCoDE alumnus Dr. Kang-Hyun Lee accepted a tenure-track faculty position at Soongsil University.
January 2026
Amin Heyrani Nobari successfully defended his thesis, becoming the first Ph.D. graduate of the DeCoDE Lab. He continues with the lab as a Postdoctoral Associate. Congratulations, Dr. Nobari!
January 2026
DeCoDE alumnus Dr. Md Ferdous Alam accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
January 2026
Dr. Ahmed visited Toyota at the Higashi-Fuji Technical Center in Japan, discussing AI for engineering design with Toyota researchers.
December 2025
The lab presented four papers at NeurIPS 2025, including Optimize Any Topology, VideoCAD, BikeBench, and Activation-Informed Merging. Read more in this post.
December 2025
Dr. Ahmed visited the Tata Steel plant in Jamshedpur, along with visits to Tata Motors in Pune and Tata Power in Mumbai, exploring opportunities for AI in manufacturing and energy.
October 2025
Dr. Ahmed received an Amazon Research Award, supporting the lab's work with AWS resources.
October 2025
Dr. Ahmed co-organized the 2025 NSF Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Systems Engineering (AI-EDSE), held October 16-17, 2025 at Purdue University, bringing together researchers to discuss the future of AI in engineering design.
August 2025
DeCoDE alumnus Dr. Francis Ogoke started a tenure-track faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University.
August 2025
DeCoDE alumnus Dr. Cyril Picard joined P-1 AI, a technology startup.
August 2025
CAD-Coder paper by Annie Doris and team received the "DAC Best Paper Award"
August 2025
Dr. Ahmed received the 2025 DAC Young Investigator Award at the ASME IDETC conference.
July 2025
Dr. Ahmed received MIT MechE's Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.
May 2025
Congratulations to Annie Doris, Noah Bagazinski, and Amin Heyrani Nobari on receiving MIT MechE student awards!
April 2025
Dr. Ahmed received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Read more at MIT News.
January 2025
Dr. Ahmed co-created "Designing Solutions with AI," an MIT Challenge delivered worldwide through Nord Anglia Education, drawing more than 1,800 submitted projects from about 50 schools in over 20 countries. Watch the launch video.
December 2024
DrivAerNet++, our 39 TB dataset of 8,000 cars with high-fidelity CFD simulations, was published at NeurIPS 2024 and received an MIT Open Data Prize.
November 2024
The DeCoDE Lab hosted a workshop with visitors from Toyota Research and Toyota Japan.
August 2024
Dr. Ahmed received the 2024 DTM Young Investigator Award at the ASME IDETC conference.
August 2024
DeCoDE lab members attended and presented work at the ASME IDETC 2024 conference.
August 2024
We conducted the second Data2Design workshop during IDETC 2024. We were grateful for the thoughtful discussions, insightful questions, and genuine engagement from all the attendees. Check out the webpage to see the program here.
July 2024
Dr. Ahmed was appointed to the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization at MIT.
May 2024
Dr. Srivastava and Dr. Ahmed co-organized the first-ever InstructLab workshop on LLMs at the MIT IBM office.
May 2024
Dr. Ahmed and Dr. Alam received the Google Research Scholar Award 2024 in Applied Science.
March 2024
Lyle Regenwetter was named a Design Fellow by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD).
February 2024
Kristen spoke about her research which she and her team published in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design: ADVISE: Accelerating the Creation of Evidence Syntheses for Global Development Using Natural Language Processing-Supported Human-Artificial Intelligence Collaboration.
December 2023
Rui Zhou won the MIT Pillar AI Collective Fellowship.
December 2023
Lyle, Amin, and DeCoDE alumni Giorgio and Binyang attended and presented their work at NeurIPS 2023.
October 2023
Rui Zhou won the MIT Flagship award and Noah Bagazinski and Kristen Edwards won the runner-up prize at the MIT IGNITE Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competition.
September 2023
We announced that Dr. Binyang Song had accepted a tenure-track faculty position at Virginia Tech in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Learn more.
July 2023
Dr. Ahmed was appointed to the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) Career Development Professorship at MIT.
September 2023
We welcomed Annie, Nomi, Nicholas, Rosen, Brandon, and Kaira to the DeCoDE lab.
August 2023
We saw a large number of participants join our workshop during IDETC 2023. We were grateful for the thoughtful discussions, insightful questions, and genuine engagement from all the attendees. Check out the webpage to see the program here.
August 2023
Noah Bagazinski won an award for Exemplary Poster Presentation in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at the NDSEG Fellowship Conference in San Antonio, Texas.
July 2023
Amin received the 2023 Mathworks Fellowship at MIT.
May 2023
Kristen passed the MechE qualifying exams.
April 2023
DeCoDE lab launched its student-run Instagram page follow us.
March 2023
DeCoDE lab celebrated IDETC conference submissions in North End.
February 2023
Kristen and Noah won awards for their posters at MERE 2023.
February 2023
Noah and Amin passed MechE qualifying exams.
January 2023
We thanked Dr. Conrad Tucker and the AiPEX lab team for visiting us and sharing their fantastic work.
August 2022
Amin received the 2022 Mathworks Fellowship at MIT.
August 2022
Noah and Lyle won the third prize at two ASME IDETC Hackathons.
August 2022
Dr. Ahmed won the Honorable Mention award in the JMD editors’ choice award for their PaDGAN paper.
August 2022
Kristen completed her master's degree in MechE.
July 2022
Dr. Ahmed received the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.
June 2022
Noah won the ASME Student Poster Travel Award.
May 2022
Lyle passed MechE qualifying exams and became DeCoDE lab's first Ph.D. candidate.
May 2022
Lyle and Amin completed their master's degrees in MechE.
April 2022
Lyle received honorable mention in the NSF GRFP award.
April 2022
Kristen received the NSF GRFP award.
September 2021
Amin received the 2021 Mathworks Fellowship at MIT.
July 2021
Dr. Ahmed received the 2022 Alumni Excellence Research Award from the UMD Alumni Association.
July 2020
Dr. Ahmed was appointed to the d'Arbeloff Career Development Professorship at MIT upon joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Social gatherings, outings, and everyday moments
Ferdous and Tyler's farewell
Dec 2025
Topsfield fair
Oct 2025
Pickleball at Faez's house
May 2025
Lab Outing
May 2024
Lab Gathering at Faez's house
May 2024
Lab Board Game Night
Mar 2024
Lab Potluck
Jan 2024
Lab Hike
Oct 2023
First Year Student Hotpot
Sept 2023
Lab Ice Cream Gathering
May 2023
Kayaking
May 2023
Lab Hike
May 2022
Boardgames
December 2021
Dinner
February 2021