Christopher Brinton, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Christopher Brinton, assistant professor in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received a 2022 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The program seeks to identify and support academic scientists and engineers who are in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment, who have received their doctorate or equivalent degree in the past seven years, and who show exceptional promise for doing creative research.

Brinton is receiving the honor for a project entitled “Distributed Intelligence Optimization under Interference in Heterogeneous Resource-Constrained Wireless Systems.” He conducts research in distributed machine learning, a burgeoning area which aims to train intelligence models efficiently and effectively over contemporary network architectures like the Internet of Things (IoT). The objective of this project is to investigate distributed learning over congested and contested wireless systems of interest to the department of defense. The project will investigate the underlying relationships between wireless connectivity, device characteristics, and intelligence performance in the presence of intentional and unintentional sources of interference. Spatial and temporal redundancies that emerge naturally across wireless systems will be employed in the development of adaptive control algorithms for protecting against wireless threats.

“ONR, and the Naval Research Enterprise as a whole, is looking to reimagine naval power,” said Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Lorin C. Selby. “To do so, it is critical that we attract the best and brightest scientists and engineers from across academia to tackle warfighting challenges. The Young Investigator Program does just that.”

The objectives of the Young Investigator Program (YIP) program are to attract outstanding faculty members of Institutions of Higher Education to the Department of the Navy's Science and Technology (S&T) research program, to support their research, and to encourage their teaching and research careers.

“It is an honor to have been selected for ONR’s 2022 YIP,” said Brinton. “I look forward to working with the Electronic Warfare (EW) program officers at ONR and my research team at Purdue to develop robust, agile, and efficient distributed intelligence management techniques for wireless systems.”

The 2022 YIP awardees were chosen from more than 220 applicants. Brinton is one of 32 recipients who will share nearly $17 million in funding to conduct innovative scientific research that will benefit the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.