My research focuses on enabling safe, secure, and autonomous applications in the Internet-of-Things by developing novel control, learning, and optimization tools. The Internet-of-Things is a multi-device system whose sensing, processing, learning, and actuation capabilities are joined by the availability of wireless communication. These connected communities of devices are in close interaction with the physical world as they collect data signals from sensors, learn and adapt to disturbances, coordinate, and actuate back physical inputs in an autonomous closed-loop fashion. Application domains include smart transportation systems involving self-driving cars and vehicle-to-vehicle coordination, industrial automation and robotics, monitoring of smart infrastructures, smart agricultural systems, and multi-agent military operations. These applications offer a unique potential for greater economic and social impact, and also give rise to new fundamental research drives:


Drive 1: Autonomous Systems in the 5G Wireless Era


Drive 2: Data Science and Learning for Autonomous Systems and Control


Drive 3: Secure and Resilient Internet-of-Things


Application Domains



Transportation. The low-latency high-reliability control and communication developments of Drive 1 are of particular interest to vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity. My plan will be to enable self-driving cars and platooning trucks to exchange information about current state, velocity, intended directions, or observed obstacles with the goal of improving fuel efficiency and road utilization while at the same time maintaining strict safe spaces even at high speeds.







Robotics. Mobile agents in partially known environments must reliably collect valuable information with as few samples as possible and maintain safety and operational constraints at all times. I plan to evaluate the safe autonomy and interconnected learning of Drive 2 in these scenarios. Furthermore, I plan to consider mobile agents in military operations that must accomplish tasks even under adversarial communication interference and data manipulation, incorporating resiliency developed in Drive 3.





Smart Infrastructures. Future smart infrastructures will be instrumented with large numbers of wireless devices. I plan to evaluate the developments of Drive 1, especially in terms of scalability, in applications including monitoring of built environments, smart cities, environmental processes and agriculture systems. My goal will be to illustrate how connectivity improves performance metrics such as productivity and quality of monitoring.