Research

Our research centers around the sensing, communication, and analysis of various forms of information with the goal of decision making and control to enable autonomous navigation, robotics, smart environments, medical diagnosis and treatment, etc.

While the range of our research interests is broad, we share a common approach to problem-solving – the pursuit of foundational research, and the development of sophisticated analytic and algorithmic tools from mathematics, statistics, computer science, and physics.

Our research often involves the use of mathematical models tied to the physics of the phenomena underlying the generation and sensing of information, whether electromagnetic, biological, chemical, or mechanical. Information, however, may also arise from more abstract phenomena such as patterns of behavior in surveillance videos, internet traffic, the stock market, geographic disease dynamics, and social interactions. Information from the real world, whether physical or abstract, is extremely complex, high-dimensional, and is almost always accompanied by noise and uncertainty. Hence stochastic models play a fundamental role in our research.