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Reza
Olfati-Saber, assistant professor of engineering at Thayer School of
Engineering, and Fabio Pellacini, an
assistant professor of computer
science, were recently honored with awards from the Faculty Early Career
Development (CAREER) Program at the National
Science Foundation (NSF). The award recognizes and supports the activities
of teacher/scholars early in their careers, and the awardees are often
considered emerging leaders in their respective fields. Recipients are selected
for career development plans that integrate research and teaching.
Reza Olfati-Sabher
Fabio Pellacini
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Olfati-Saber’s interests lie in the study of complex self-organizing
systems, particularly mobile sensor networks that consist of wireless networks
of sensors (such as radar, sonar, or cameras) embedded in robots, unmanned
vehicles, cars, or personal mobile devices, like cell phones. These sensors
gather real-time information about hazardous or uncertain environments, which
is helpful in coordinated operations such as search and rescue, surveillance,
and disaster response.
“We’re developing networked sensing and decision-making systems that can
survive failures of their constituent parts and continue to function as a
whole,” says Olfati-Saber. “Many of our innovative team coordination methods
are inspired by nature—the study of the behavior of flocks, schools, and
swarms—though it takes the combination of a sophisticated set of tools from
control theory, communications, physics, and computer science to make this
inspiration a reality.”
Pellacini works on computer graphics, design, and animation. He is
particularly interested in developing methods to make synthetic imagery
accessible to novice computer users. The NSF funding will support a combination
of research and education. The research component will simplify the design of
objects’ appearance, which comes from the interaction of materials and lights
in synthetic scenes.
For the education component, Pellacini says, “I want to develop an education
program that enables students to explore the interaction between the
conceptual, technical, and aesthetic principles of image synthesis. As a
scientist, my long-term goal is to stimulate and enable artists’ creativity by
developing intuitive user interfaces for creating digital art that are as
simple as sketching on paper.”
Other Dartmouth professors who have been recently honored with NSF Career
Awards include Devin
Balkcom, Christopher
Bailey-Kellogg, Amit
Chakrabarti, and Sean Smith
in the computer science department; Kristina
Lynch, Barrett
Rogers, and Robert
Caldwell in physics and astronomy; Robert Grubbs in
chemistry; David
Peterson in the linguistics and cognitive science program; and David
Bucci in psychological and brain sciences.
By SUSAN KNAPP
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