Dr. Kia, Solmaz S.
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of California, Irvine (UCI)
Seminar Information
Multi-agent deployment for coverage is a classical problem that appears in many applications such as area surveillance and monitoring, wireless communication coverage, or data harvesting. The Voronoi partitioning method and its variations have long been recognized as the leading solution to this problem. In this talk, we will discuss reasons that motive us to look beyond the Voronoi partitioning and present a new set of deployment approaches we develop as assignment problems that can be cast as combinatorial optimization problems such as maximum bipartite matching or submodular maximization problems.
Solmaz Kia is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), CA, USA. She also has a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Computer Science Department of UCI. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from UCI, in 2009, and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2004 and 2001, respectively. She was a senior research engineer at SySense Inc., El Segundo, CA from Jun. 2009 to Sep. 2010. She held postdoctoral positions in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego and UCI. She was a recipient of the UC president’s post-doctoral fellowship in 2012-2014, an NSF CAREER award in 2017, and the best CSM paper award in 2021. She is a senior member of IEEE. Dr. Kia is an associate editor for Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems. Her main research interests, in a broad sense, include distributed optimization/coordination/estimation, nonlinear control theory, and probabilistic robotics navigation and motion planning.