Haris Vikalo

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

The University of Texas at Austin

hvikalo [AT] ece.utexas.edu  ·  Google Scholar

Selected recent research directions/projects

Schematic of context-dependent genomic perturbation response

Continual Learning at the Edge

We study how ML systems deployed on resource-constrained, distributed devices can adapt over time without storing raw past data and without overwriting previously acquired knowledge. The project develops a unified replay-free, projection-based framework for three core deployment challenges: efficiency, through compact and quantized task subspaces for low-SWaP platforms; controllability, through architectural and activation-level disentanglement that enables safe removal of obsolete task knowledge; and collaboration, through federated continual learning across heterogeneous clients without raw-data sharing or task labels at inference.

Schematic of context-dependent genomic perturbation response

Interpretable AI for Genomic Perturbation Response

We are designing an interpretable multimodal AI platform for predicting response to context-dependent genomic perturbations. The curated benchmark and a multimodal foundation-model framework will integrate pre-perturbation transcriptomic and chromatin context with perturbation information to predict downstream transcriptional and cell-state changes. A central aim is to move beyond black-box prediction by learning reusable regulatory programs that support biologically grounded interpretation.