Research Statement

Over the past several years we have witnessed an unprecedented evolution not seen for many centuries of technology, ecosystems, ethics, and governance that have become increasingly integrated into all aspects of our everyday lives. This fascinating phenomenon requires a radically different way of thinking, namely, the emergence of applications and environments that involve strong multidisciplinary aspects. The examples are numerous, including autonomous systems that are critical to safety, health, commerce, networks, physical environments, society, policy, and a wide range of internet applications. Problems that stem from such applications are dramatically different from traditional problems as the behavior of autonomous systems and the participants of these applications are determined by their own goals and not always by the instructions of the designer. From a technical viewpoint, these problems will require the fusion of methodologies and cooperation of multidisciplinary areas and above all, a novel set of ideas and tools from different perspectives. Currently, we have the opportunity to develop the framework which will allow us to have a sustainable footprint in the behaviors of such systems.

Current Research

We are currently working on and leading many projects that leverage multidisciplinary backgrounds to conduct interdisciplinary studies and research. Our research primarily focuses on the intersections of four topics: (1) theoretical and applied physics, (2) machine learning and artificial intelligence, (3) bioinformatics, and (4) mechanical and aerospace engineering.

One of our current projects is dealing with resilience analysis and population prediction using information from disaster operations. Where the objective is to develop tools for better disaster response enabled by real-time information extraction and agent-based population modeling.

When working with ML and AI, safety is at the forefront, as reinforcement learning techniques are applied to agents to learn complex behaviors on their own, a growing concern arises on the safety and behavior of such agents. In the AI safety project, we work with a team to look at the unintended consequences of allowing systems to learn on their own and explore emerging challenges in AI safety.

Part of the physics modeling efforts, we are working with a research team to develop tools to analyze large data clusters in a more refined and comprehensive setting that deals with time history to predict future settings and schemes. This effort is looking at developing and simulating unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) hierarchical swarming capability. As the number of agents increases in these swarming systems so too does the complexity associated with tracking, navigation, and operational awareness. Thus, cleaver schemes derived from dynamic co-fields and ML/AI are leveraged.

Assured autonomy has been fundamental too much of our research in some way or another. As such, we are currently working on designing resilient autonomous vehicles. The exploratory group focuses on the security of autonomous vehicles for operational missions. This group is aimed at identifying what are the new security challenges for unmanned and autonomous vehicles and organizing our findings in a framework that would allow us to perform more targeted risk and security assessments of these systems. Besides the AI component which introduces a new element of uncertainty, together with the complexity of the system, we are looking at the concept of resilience to complement the classical risk-based approach.

On the same theme of autonomy, Dr. Yasin is currently appointed as the lead for the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) for NASA’s autonomy focus group for excavation and construction on the moon. The goal of this focus group is to assist NASA in evaluating technologies that enable affordable, robust, autonomous manufacturing and construction on the lunar surface to establish a sustained human presence. Landing and launch pads, habitats (surface and underground), roads, berms, and power infrastructure are some of the infrastructural elements the focus group is focusing on presently. Dr. Yasin is working with the team to explore relevant technologies of interest including additive construction, autonomous construction, excavation tools for lunar conditions, sintering, regolith processing, in-sit repair, and outfitting. The goal of the focus group includes identifying challenges to excavation and construction in lunar environments and exploring current industry technologies that will lead to sustaining a human lunar presence.

Other research areas Dr. Yasin mentors and supports are listed in the mentoring page of this website. For many of these projects, Dr. Yasin serves as a technical advisor, contributor, lead, and supervisor. We aim to advise sponsors and staff on scientific approaches, lead analysis and modeling efforts, and engage constructively. We have the privilege to be part of the teams that are driving cutting-edge work in research areas that encompasses multidisciplinary system design and analysis. Our research aims to leverage and understand how multidisciplinary perspectives can further advance novel approaches to system design and analysis.

Future Perspective

Future research will in-part deal with automation in hybrid systems and human-machine teaming. Most of the research will aim at developing better approaches to solving multi-process challenges. We find that one of the most important paths to success is to organize an all-encompassing team that addresses current global needs. We would like teams and groups to be open to new ideas from multidisciplinary perspectives with norms and expectations to respect fellow teammates, open to new ideas, and a background in autonomy is not required, just to have a curious mind.

Some of the areas that we find critical for future perspectives are biomedical/healthcare, human factor, security of control systems and formal methods, guidelines and standards for risk and security assessments of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Digital Twins and application to autonomous cyber defense, twins for air systems, risk and assurance of autonomous agents, robotics, surface and underwater autonomous vehicles, understanding how to assess risk in complex systems and design optimal security controls measurably based on that and possibly automating some of the processes through formal models and intelligent algorithms.

Overall, we aim to improve and support from a multidisciplinary perspective, interests in philosophy and sociology of science in our society, breaking down problems from first principles and looking at the constituent parts that underlie them, give value to projects and groups from a diverse perspective, be comfortable in the unknown and never shy away from it, and very much listening and learning. Much of our work is motivated by and related to the diversity in thinking and perspective as applied to technology, ecosystem, ethics, and governance. The work is and will be at the heart of public policy questions and debates in many future conversations. We expect this research to contribute significantly to the improvement of society and all that interact with and govern it. The debate over the most effective health, technology, and human policy interventions and social welfare are to be expected and must be addressed to better target improvement to the health and well-being of our society. Ultimately, we aim for our research to inform scholarly, policy, and the general public about the social consequences of technology on our society and policies by capturing its short and long term effects on the well-being of all lives.