Stony Brook University Professor of Computer Science, Allen Tannenbaum, PhD, received a grant from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research of over $700K for the project, Geometry of Probability Distributions with Applications to Estimation, Sensing, Surveillance, and Navigation.

“Through this research, we want to develop new techniques for analyzing signals from a geometric point of view with applications to navigation, surveillance, and control,” said Tannenbaum. “This includes defining new metrics on spaces of signals including those received from visual sensors for problems such as visual tracking and detection.”

Tannenbaum joined Stony Brook University in 2013 and he received his PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1976. His academic interests include computational computer vision, image processing, medical imaging, computer graphics, control, mathematical systems theory, control of semiconductor fabrication processes, robotics, operator theory, algebraic and deferential geometry, invariant theory, and partial differential equations.

Upon receiving the grant for his project, Tannenbaum said, “there are a number of challenges associated with the project that will determine its ultimate success. The first concerns the quantification of uncertainty. All physical signals are corrupted by noise, so one must understand and then model the noise process in order to be able to treat the underlying signal.”

Tannenbaum is also a professor of Applied Mathematics, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Radiology and BMI at Stony Brook. A few of Tannenbaum’s past awards include the Kennedy Research Prize (Weizmann Institute), the NSF Research Initiation Award, and the O. Hugo Schuck Award.