2018 MILCOM

Nora Ayanian, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair
University of Southern California


Nora Ayanian is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on creating end-to-end solutions for coordinating teams of robots that start from truly high-level specifications and deliver code for individual robots in the team, such as using simple multitouch inputs to control a team of UAVs. Ayanian brings a unique approach to multirobot systems, creating unified solutions that address task assignment, path planning, and control that are broadly applicable across all aspects of multirobot systems and mobile sensor networks. Her solutions provide guarantees of convergence and safety on real robotic systems. She won the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2008 for her work on constrained multirobot control, and with her collaborators, Best Paper in Robotics Track at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. She was named one of IEEE Intelligent Systems "AI's 10 to watch" (2013), NerdScholar's "40 Under 40: Professors who Inspire" (2014), and was part of the inaugural Mic 50 (2015), Mic.com's list of 50 influential young people, and MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators under 35" (TR35, 2016). In 2016, she was received the NSF CAREER award and the Okawa Foundation Research Grant. Ayanian is a co-founder and current co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Multi-Robot Systems.

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