ICON welcomes 10 new faculty at recent orientation event
The Center for Innovation in Control, Optimization, and Networks (ICON) welcomed 10 new ICON-affiliated faculty at an orientation event on Sept. 9. The faculty represent the schools of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Civil Engineering, Elmore Family of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and Purdue Polytechnic Institute.
In attendance to welcome the new faculty were Wayne Chen, associate dean for research and innovation and the Reilly Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Materials, and Young-Jun Son, James J. Solberg Head and Professor of Industrial Engineering. ICON’s co-directors Shaoshuai Mou and Shreyas Sundaram presented ICON’s recent progress in enhancing multi-disciplinary collaboration in research and education to address fundamental challenges in autonomy.
Four ICON-affiliated associate professors — Ran Dai (AAE), Mohammad Reza Jahanshahi (CE), Nina Mahmoudian (ME) and Byung-Cheol Min (Poly) — provided advice on navigating the tenure process. Each new faculty member introduced their research, shared their perspectives and benefited from the face-to-face discussions with other ICON faculty.
Miad Faezipour is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering technology in the Purdue School of Engineering Technology. She directs the Digital/Biomedical Embedded Systems and Technology (D-BEST) research laboratory. Faezipour received a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests primarily include healthcare technology with embedded intelligence and AI-based bio data augmentation. She is a senior member of IEEE, EMBS and IEEE Women in Engineering.
Yan Gu is an associate professor of mechanical engineering who joined the faculty in July 2022. She directs the Terrain Robotics Advanced Control and Experimentation (TRACE) Lab in the Purdue School of Mechanical Engineering. Gu received a PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue in 2017. Gu was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell between 2017 and 2022. She won the Verizon 5G Robotics Challenge Award in 2019 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2021.
Vijay Gupta is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. Previously he served as a professor of electrical engineering and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD degree at the California Institute of Technology -- all in electrical engineering. Gupta previously served as the associate chair and the director for graduate studies at Notre Dame’s Department of Electrical Engineering. His current research interests are in the broad area of distributed decision making, using both data-driven and model-driven approaches, with applications to the emerging smart and integrated architecture of societal infrastructure such as transportation networks, power grid, and water distribution networks.
Shanyue Guan is an assistant professor in the School of Construction Management Technology at Purdue. He received master’s and PhD degrees in civil engineering from the University of Florida, and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Tongji University, Shanghai, China. Prior to joining Purdue, Guan worked as an assistant professor at East Carolina University. His research interests include, but are not limited to, smart infrastructure and construction, structural health monitoring, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and drone applications. He has been involved with multiple research projects funded by different federal and state agencies.
Murat Kocaoglu is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. His current research interests include causal inference, generative adversarial networks, and information theory. Specifically, his research focuses on learning causal graphs from observational and/or experimental data. He received a PhD degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Kocaoglu was a research staff member in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in IBM Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 2018 to 2020.
Keith LeGrand is an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue. Hired as part of Purdue’s Cislunar Space Initiative, LeGrand and his lab will work to advance research in cislunar space domain awareness (SDA) and spacecraft navigation. He received a PhD degree in aerospace engineering at Cornell University, where he worked in the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC). Prior to that, LeGrand was a senior member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he conducted research in inertial navigation, space systems, and multi-object tracking. His research interests include space domain awareness; multi-sensor multi-object tracking; satellite guidance, navigation, and control; and information theory.
Tianyi Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue. Her research centers around sensemaking, crowd computing, intelligent user interface, and their applications on human-AI teaming in domain-specific decision making. Li designs and develops systems for computer-supported cooperative work. Her research includes crowdsourced sensemaking, to scaffold collective intelligence of novice crowds for tasks such as intelligence analysis. Throughout her work, she investigates and evaluates the UX impact of different human-AI interaction patterns. Li received a PhD in computer science from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Hong Kong. Previously, Li was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Loyola University Chicago. She has also worked in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group in Microsoft Research AI, the UX team in Cloudera, and Informatica.
Husheng Li is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and professor of computer engineering. He received a PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as a senior engineer at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, and in 2007 he joined the EECS department of the University of Tennessee as an assistant professor. He is promoted to associate professor in 2013. Li’s research is mainly focused on statistical signal processing, wireless communications, networking, smart grid and game theory. He is the recipient of Best Paper Awards from EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and Networks (2005), EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing (2015), IEEE International Conference on Communications (2011) and IEEE SmartGridComm Conference (2012), and the Best Demo Award of IEEE Globecom (2010).
Kenshiro Oguri is an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue. He received a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021. His research interest lies at the intersection of astrodynamics, control, and optimization. He develops mathematical and computational frameworks that address scientific and engineering challenges in space exploration, through advancing the state-of-the-art in space mission design, space trajectory optimization, spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control (GNC), and space autonomy. He also leverages his flight project experience as a mission designer at NASA JPL and JAXA to blend theory and practice, to identify and address critical challenges in real-world applications, and to contribute to the forefront of space exploration.
Ziran Wang is an assistant professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue, where he leads the Purdue Digital Twin Lab, which aims to build digital replicas of real-world entities base on AI, big data, cloud/edge commuting, and mixed reality. He was a principal researcher at Toyota Motor North American R&D’s InfoTech Labs, where he led the Digital Twin Roadmap. Wang earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Riverside in 2019. He has authored 40+ refereed papers and 50+ patent applications. His research achievements have been demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and acknowledged by a National Center for Sustainable Transportation Dissertation Award issued by U.S. Department of Transportation. In addition, he received the SAE Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award in 2019 and the SAE Arch T. Colwell Merit Award in 2021.