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Research Quick Takes

Professor Vaze presenting at the AI EDGE Symposium.

Oct 08, 2026

Humans, AI & Optimization

Professor Vikrant Vaze was invited to speak at the GE Vernova AI EDGE Symposium in New York. His talk, titled "Multi-Objective Stochastic Optimization of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems in Fragile States," was based on his work done with PhD students Lilly Yang and Siqi Ke and MS student Ryan Proulx '25 as co-authors. "The biggest takeaways from the symposium were about the future of work itself, about the industry-wide opportunities and challenges associated with the rapidly evolving business practices to accommodate AI-human teams—learning what to delegate to AI and what must be human-controlled," said Vaze.

Yineng "Phoebe" Sun headshot

Sep 24, 2026

Optimizing Complex Delivery Systems

PhD candidate Yineng "Phoebe" Sun Th'17 Th'26 is first author, with Lecturer Armin Fügenschuh and Professor Vikrant Vaze as co-authors, of "Physics-aware truck and drone delivery planning using optimization & machine learning" published in Computers & Operations Research. The presented framework has been shown to reduce delivery time and energy use compared with simplified planning approaches. "This work matters because it brings realistic physical modeling into operations research, showing how optimization and data-driven methods can work together to make complex delivery systems both more efficient and more practical," said Sun.

Sie Hendrata Dharmawan presents at the conference in Italy.

Sep 24, 2026

Revealing Structure in Complex Data

Industry PhD student Sie Hendrata Dharmawan presented four papers from Professor Peter Chin's LISP Lab at the 35th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks in Padua, Italy. "I am grateful to Professor Chin, the LISP Lab, and my collaborators for making this possible, and to Muhammad Farrukh and colleagues for trusting me to present their work on topological anomaly detection. What ties these papers together is a question I care about deeply: how do we capture the structure hidden in complex data? Whether it's adding loop structure to graph neural networks, measuring a node's sphere of influence with game theory, or detecting communities across multiple networks, the conference gave us great feedback and follow-up work, and I'm looking forward to diving into it," said Dharmawan.

Paulina Umansky on a glacier in Alaska

Sep 17, 2026

Detecting Life in Icy, Extreme Environments

This past summer, PhD student Paulina Umansky, who works with Professor Ian Baker on Antarctic ice microstructure and Professor Jacob Buffo on life detection in planetary ices, lived on the Taku Glacier in Alaska for three weeks as a participant in the Juneau Icefield Research Program. "The Juneau Icefield serves as an analog for environments across the solar system such as Mars and Europa. I conducted a pilot study on 'Life Detection Across Taku Glacier,' collecting subglacial and supraglacial samples. In the field, I learned several assays and applied them to analyze these samples, quantifying biosignatures present across the icefield," says Umansky.

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