Dipankar Maity Wins NSF CAREER Award
Dr. Dipankar Maity, an Assistant Professor of ECE, has received the prestigious NSF CAREER award for groundbreaking work on the design and optimization of Networked Multi-agent Systems (NMS)—the backbone of many next-generation technologies, including drone swarms, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent power grids.
These complex systems rely on coordinated decisions across multiple agents—each with its own sensors, controllers, and objectives—all connected through a shared communication network. Dr. Maity’s research tackles the fundamental challenge at the heart of these systems: how to manage communication resources (like bandwidth, latency, and reliability) in a way that directly enhances control and performance.
What sets this work apart is its unified control-communication framework. Rather than treating communication and control as separate problems, this project develops communication-aware controllers and control-aware communication protocols—ensuring that both agents and network managers make decisions informed by each other’s capabilities and constraints. The result: smarter, more adaptive systems that perform reliably even in resource-constrained or uncertain environments.
This research not only enables better coordination in robotic teams and safer decision-making in autonomous vehicles but also holds potential for improving critical infrastructure like power-grid regulation. Through theoretical innovations and practical tools, it offers deep insights into how communication parameters trade off against one another—and how to make optimal decisions under uncertainty.
Beyond its technical contributions, the project is deeply committed to education and outreach, with initiatives aimed at inspiring K-12 students to pursue STEM and integrating cutting-edge topics in control systems into undergraduate and graduate curricula.
This award recognizes both the scientific excellence and the societal impact of Dr. Maity’s work, and we look forward to seeing the transformative applications it will enable in the years ahead.