I graduated with a PhD in Applied Math and Statistics from the School of Engineering of the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research was with Prof. Jorge Cortés in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of University of California, San Diego. Our work was in the general area of robotic control and control theory. I desperately need to hand off maintenance of the web page for the controls research group at UCSC.

My research sits at the intersection of distributed algorithms and distributed control. Distributed control is the study of how multiple computational units, sensors and actuators can be networked together to control a single system, usually with an emphasis on requiring minimal communication. Distributed algorithms studies similar topics, but without sensing and actuation, and a greater emphasis on computation. I largely deal with problems featuring a swarm of robots communicating over a wireless network.

My thesis dealt with problems related to how to constrain motion of robots in a swarm so as not to lose global network connectivity of the swarm. I focussed on ways to do this which require local communication, with the desire of minimizing the amount of communication required.

I started graduate school intending to study computer graphics, and still have a collection of class projects and flashy demosfrom those days. I chose my current advisor and research area after taking a class on non-linear control theory.

Prior to coming to UCSC, I worked for a few years as a programmer at Common Point Inc and the now-defunct Sense8 Corporation I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to write collision-detection systems professionally for one of these companies, and improve an existing collision-detection system for the other.

Before that I completed my undergraduate degree in computer science (with a minor in mathematics) at Carnegie Mellon University. I still occasionally visit their puzzle page.

Previous intern-ships include work on graphics and GIS at TerraSim and working on graphics and robotics in support of machine learning and robot learning research at the Naval Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence.