Colloquium

Quantum computation has potential to solve problems that are out of reach for today’s classical computers. Many of the proposed applications for quantum computers (QCs), such as those in chemistry, material science, and optimization, are capable of substantial human impact. However, the full promise of quantum will only be realized if better qubits and QCs […]

Rapidly growing renewable generations and peak loads pose a serious threat to the security and reliability of modern power and energy systems. A critical question is "how to accommodate a high penetration of renewable generation and deep electrification?". This talk focuses on two key challenges, i.e., unknown information and the scalability issue of coordinating large-scale […]

The unabated pursuit for omniscient and omnipotent AI is levying hefty latency, memory, and energy taxes at all computing scales. At the same time, the end of Dennard scaling is sunsetting traditional performance gains commonly attained with reduction in transistor feature size. Faced with these challenges, my research is building a heterogeneity of solutions co-optimized […]

The decline of Moore's law and an increasing reliance on computation has led to an explosion of specialized software packages and hardware architectures. While this diversity enables unprecedented flexibility, it also requires domain-experts to learn how to customize programs to efficiently leverage the latest platform-specific API's and data structures, instead of working on their intended […]

To perform tasks that humans want in the world, robots rely on a representation of salient task features; for example, to hand me a cup of coffee, the robot considers features like efficiency and cup orientation in its behavior. Prior methods try to learn both a representation and a downstream task jointly from data sets […]

Providing safety and performance guarantees for motion planning and control algorithms is a well-studied problem for robotic systems with well-known dynamics that operate in structured environments. However, when robots operate in a real-world setting where the environment is dynamic and unstructured, common assumptions used to develop the planning algorithms are no longer valid and consequently, […]

Quadcopters are among the most agile and dynamic machines ever created. In this talk, I’ll show how data-driven sensorimotor controllers can push quadcopters with only onboard sensing and computation to their physical limits. Such controllers enable quadcopters to fly faster and more agile than what was possible before in unstructured environments like cities, forests, and […]