Assistant professor at Northeastern also part of DoD-funded team designing control systems that utilize AI, machine learning methods in complicated environments

Mechanical engineering alum Milad Siami ’14G ’17 PhD, an assistant professor at Northeastern University, has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in support of his research on streamlining complex networks. 

The project seeks “to make large-scale complex networks simpler by sparse interactions in the right place at the right time.” 

Siami received his MS and PhD from Lehigh and was advised by mechanical engineering and mechanics professor Nader Motee, who directs Lehigh’s Distributed Control and Dynamical Systems Laboratory and Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics (AIR) Lab.

Siami joined the faculty of Northeastern’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2019 after completing postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

His research areas include cyber-physical networks and robotics, distributed systems theory and applications, network optimization and control, and hard limits and tradeoffs in large-scale dynamical networks.

Read more about Siami’s NSF-funded project here.

Siami is also collaborating on a joint project led by Professor Mario Sznaier about “Control and Learning Enabled Verifiable Robust AI.”  Their multidisciplinary team was awarded a $7.5 million, five-year grant from the Department of Defense (DoD) through its annual Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) competition. Their team will be designing “control systems capable of utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to learn from and interact within complex environments in a safe way.” 

Learn more about the research here.

Siami

Mechanical engineering and mechanics alum Milad Siami ’14G ’17 PhD

Nader Motee

Mechanical engineering and mechanics professor Nader Motee