Abstract: Collaborative autonomous robots promise to revolutionize transportation, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. Already, micro-aerial vehicles have become a multi-billion-dollar industry; and in this new decade, teams of semi-autonomous ships, cars, and underwater exploration vehicles are being launched. A future of ubiquitous autonomy is becoming a reality, where robots can autonomously split into teams,…

  Abstract: Despite high-profile advances in various decision-making and classification tasks, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have found limited application in safety-critical domains such as self-driving cars and automated healthcare. In particular, DNNs can be vulnerable to adversarial attacks and input uncertainties. This issue becomes even more complicated when DNNs are used in closed-loop systems, where…

Abstract: The expansion of large-scale cyber-physical systems such as electrical grids, transportation networks, IoT, and other societal networks has created enormous challenges for controlling them and, at the same time, tremendous opportunities for utilizing the massive amounts of data generated by them. At the core of these data-driven control problems are distributed and stochastic optimization…

  Abstract: Climate change demands faster material innovations in multiple domains to reduce the carbon emissions of various industrial processes, but it currently takes 10-20 years to develop a single material with conventional human-driven approaches due to the large amounts of trail and errors needed. Machine learning approaches enable the direct learning of structure-property relations…

  Abstract: Solid-liquid interfaces have notoriously haphazard atomic environments. While essentially amorphous, the liquid has short-range order and heterogeneous dynamics. The crystal, albeit ordered, contains a plethora of defects ranging from adatoms to dislocation-created spiral steps. All these elements are of paramount importance in the crystal growth process, which makes the crystallization kinetics challenging to…