Abstarct: Drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have seen widespread adoption in a myriad of applications such as disaster and emergency response, rescue and relief operations, security and surveillance, forest fire and agricultural monitoring, goods delivery, buildings’ structural health and real-time traffic monitoring, etc. The core functionality of drones lies in the efficient design and analysis of sophisticated algorithms that enable autonomous navigation, scheduling, and route planning in presence of obstacles, environmental uncertainty, and resource constraints (e.g., battery, onboard CPU, storage, bandwidth). This talk aims to have fun with design and analysis of drone algorithms having real-world applications that impact our daily lives and the society. Specifically, we will design deterministic and approximation algorithms for cooperative truck-drone last-mile delivery of goods, team orienteering and connected submodular function maximization problems arisen in disaster scenarios, and aisle graphs for bug detection in orchards and precision agriculture. Theoretical analysis and experimental validation will be presented where possible.

About the Speaker: Dr. Sajal K. Das is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor and Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair in Computer Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA. He also served the US National Science Foundation (NSF) as a Program Director in the Computer and Network Systems Division. His interdisciplinary research interests span cyber-physical systems, IoT, drones, cybersecurity, applied machine learning, data science, wireless and sensor networks, mobile and pervasive computing, smart environments, edge-cloud and parallel computing, applied graph theory and game theory. He has made fundamental contributions to these areas and published extensively in top-tier journals and peer-reviewed conferences. He has coauthored 60 book chapters and 4 books – Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols, and Applications; Handbook on Securing Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructure: Foundations and Challenges; Mobile Agents in Distributed Computing and Networking; and Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach. A holder of 5 US patents, Dr. Das directed over USD $24 million funded research projects. His h-index is 102 with more than 44,000 citations according to Google Scholar.

He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal and serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking. A founder of IEEE PerCom, WoWMoM, SMARTCOMP and ACM ICDCN conferences, he has served as General and Program Chair of numerous conferences.

Dr. Das is a recipient of 14 Best Paper Awards in flagship conferences like ACM MobiCom and IEEE PerCom; and awards for teaching, mentoring and research including the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement award for pioneering contributions to sensor networks and mobile computing, and the University of Missouri System President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence. He has mentored and graduated 12 postdoctoral fellows, 51 Ph.D. scholars, 31 MS thesis, and over 40 undergraduate research students. Currently he is supervising 10 Ph.D. students and 4 postdocs. Dr. Das is a Distinguished alumnus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and a Fellow of the IEEE, National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA).

We look forward to your active participation.