I am a research scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems and adjunct professor in the Computer Science department at Vanderbilt University. My research interests are developing and applying foundational machine learning and reinforcement learning methods for the safety, control, and optimization of cyber-physical systems in crucial areas, such as smart mobility, safety in aerospace operations, and energy management optimization.
I co-lead two research groups of graduate and undergraduate students as part of the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems (MACS) lab and the Work lab. We have developed and deployed control systems across buildings, drones, and transportation infrastructure systems.
I teach different classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These courses are open to CS/DS students and students from other departments and majors.
I am member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and the Prognostics and Health Management Society (PHM).
Latest news
- March 2025: Two papers have been accepted to the 16th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems: “Real-Time Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection System via Radar Detector Sensors” led by Austin Coursey, and “1000DaySim: Open-Source Traffic Simulation With Real Data Over Long Time Horizons” led by Zhiyao Zhang.
- March 2025: Our paper “On the Design of Safe Continual RL Methods for Control of Nonlinear Systems” has been accepted for ECC 2025.
- February 2025: We won the 2025 Best Paper award - TRB subcommittee on Travel Time Speed and Reliability for our work “Assessing an AI-based Variable Speed Limit System on Proactive Slowdown Warnings with Ultra-High Fidelity Speed Data”.
- January 2025: I am organizing and chairing the next International Conference on Principles of Diagnosis and Resilient Systems (DX’25)
- January 2025: One of our graduate students in the Work lab, Yuhang Zhang, presents our results in Assessing an AI-based Variable Speed Limit System on Proactive Slowdown Warnings with Ultra-High Fidelity Speed Data at the TRB Annual Meeting
- December 2024: One of our graduate students in the MACS lab, Austin Coursey, presents our latest work at NeurIPS 2024.
- November 2024: Our paper “MARVEL: Bringing Multi-Agent Reinforcement-Learning Based Variable Speed Limit Controllers Closer to Deployment” has been accepted for publication at IEEE Access.
- November 2024: I will be presenting two papers at The 35th International Conference on Principles of Diagnosis and Resilient Systems (DX’24) in Vienna, Austria. We are also organizing the next edition in Nashville, 2025.
- October 2024: Our paper “FT-AED: Benchmark Dataset for Early Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection” has been accepted for the Datasets and Benchmarks track at NeurIPS 2024.
- September 2024: Our research group attended the 27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems in Edmonton, Canada. Two papers of our students have been accepted.
- August 2024: I attended The Tennessee Drone Symposium hosted at Middle Tennessee State University.
- July 2024: I participated in a workshop about a new project on video analytics for Critical Care Air Transport Team held at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center Cincinnati C-STARS, Ohio.
- July 2024: One of the graduate students in the MACS lab, Austin Coursey, presents our latest work on experiment design for data-driven safe control at AIAA Aviation 2024 in Vegas, Nevada.
- July 2024: We successfully flight-tested our disturbance-rejection controller at MIT Lincoln labs!
- July 2024: One of the graduate students in the MACS lab, Austin Coursey, presents our latest work on data-driven control at the 2024 American Control Conference in Toronto, Canada.
- June 2024: I presented three papers at the 12th IFAC Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety for Technical Processes in Ferrara, Italy.