Research Interests

• Complex Systems, Self Organizing Systems, Emergence
• Nonlinear Dynamics, Synchronization, Chaos
• Stigmergy, Swarm Intelligence, Collective Intelligence

Previous Research

• My MS thesis was about "Using Environment as a Means of Communication in Distributed Systems". In that research we considered the methods that the agents in an environment use for implicit communication. That led our research to systems with high number of agents that have limited capabilities. They had uncertainties in their sensory inputs and had bounded rationality in their decision makings. We developed some approaches for overcoming these limitations. As an example, we showed that how a set of virtual springs connecting the agents together could result in robust group movements. Using RoboCup benchmark, we also showed that when we have limited amount of processing resources, our agents performed better than sophisticated agents. We also set some experiments with multiple light weight robots and studied the group behaviors.
• In a part of my researches in Texas A&M University, we studied some naturally occurring behaviors in groups of individuals (more details are here). We modeled and simulated the behaviors of the individuals and observed the group behaviors that emerged from their interactions. We inspired from some natural behavior like foraging, pursuing and patrolling.
• I worked for a period of time on Survivor Buddy Project (a joint venture of Stanford University, Texas A&M University, and The University of South Florida. It is corporately sponsored by Microsoft)
• In the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Texas A&M University, we studied a system that contained multiple agents with limited capabilities. Our goal was to raise a group level intelligence. We created a vector field to guide the agents in the environment. This vector field was made by blending a set of linear dynamical systems so that as a whole, it showed the desired non-linear behavior. Each linear system had an equilibrium, which was stable or unstable and was a node or a focus. The blending function was a differentiable combination of those linear functions that guided the agents in the environment. In that system the obstacles were presented with unstable nodes or foci and targets were presented with stable nodes or foci (the choice of node or focus depended on the type). The agents were simple and limited, but they could still achieve a set of goals.

Current Research

• My research interests are in the areas of Complex Systems and Emergence. In one hand, I am interested in studying the ubiquitous characteristics behind all these systems from a theoretical perspective. On the other hand, I want to exploit my knowledge about complexity for different applications. One of them is a robotics application that we have a large group of mobile robots with limited capabilities and we want to make some desired higher level group behaviors. Another sample application is controlling a crowd of people with individual level controls.
• We are currently studying synchronization of oscillators. We use mechanical metronomes as self-sustained oscillators and we have a mechanism to facilitate active coupling between metronomes.