Silvia Ferrari was elected a fellow of ASME

Silvia Ferrari

Silvia Ferrari, John Brancaccio Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Ferrari is the Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls (LISC), where her principal research interests include robust adaptive control of aircraft, learning and approximate dynamic programming, and optimal control of mobile sensor networks.

She is one of the founders of the field of active perception, as evidenced by her recently completed book “Information-driven Planning and Control.” Ferrari also recently gave a TEDx Talk titled “Do robots dream of electric sheep?” that discusses our potential for teaching robots and AI how to work collaboratively to better our future.

Ferrari’s most significant contributions are novel information gain functions and a new class of planning algorithms for mobile perception and information gathering that are now implemented routinely onboard underwater and aerial unmanned vehicles.

Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, she was Professor of Engineering and Computer Science, and Founder and Director of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) and Fellowship program on Wireless Intelligent Sensor Networks (WISeNet) at Duke University.

Ferrari is a senior member of AIAA and IEEE, and a member of SPIE. She has won many notable awards over the course of her career including the ONR Young Investigator Award, the NSF Career Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

In addition to her extensive research and teaching successes, Ferrari also co-leads the Veho Institute for vehicle intelligence, an initiative that partners Cornell with Italian universities and luxury automakers. The institute’s central goal is advancing automotive engineering and data science, with an emphasis on societal impacts, through collaboration between students, faculty and auto industry partners. 

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