Systems Briefs

Energy-efficient sensor networks
Sensor networks were originally developed for battlefield surveillance and other military uses, but they have found application in many other areas, including traffic control, civil engineering, monitoring of the environment, health care, home automation and homeland security.

Teaching computers to learn like we do
With a five-year CAREER Award from NSF, Muñoz-Avila hopes to enable computers to "learn" as humans do – by taking a set of inputs, evaluating past outcomes of similar scenarios and making decisions based on experience.

Software for optimization
Ted Ralphs, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, writes optimization software that can be customized to a variety of applications. He attempts to accelerate optimization by applying more efficient computing power and using multiple processors and parallel computers in tandem.

The best of times for fusion research
Eugenio Schuster recently received an NSF CAREER Award to study the nonlinear control of plasma, or ionized hydrogen gas, in nuclear fusion. He has helped edit two special editions of IEEE Control Systems Magazine on fusion, and has organized an NSF workshop on the modeling and control of fusion.