Dr. David K.A. Mordecai Co-Advised an NYU CUSP Capstone on Autonomous Drone Swarm Exploration
Dr. David K.A. Mordecai and Professor Giuseppe Loianno, PhD, Professor of Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering co-advised a team of graduate students in an NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) Capstone research project entitled Bridging Graph Neural Network and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Drone Swarm Exploration, with the undernoted synopsis.
Synopsis: Drone technology has been rapidly advancing in recent years primarily due to improvements in constrained computational capabilities and algorithmic development. Drone swarms offer advantages relative to single drone deployment, in terms of fault-tolerance, adaptability and scalability. Drone swarms also offer applications in the fields of mapping, inspection, surveillance etc. This project explores tradeoffs related to optimal coverage of a simulation environment with adaptive motion planning using autonomous drone swarms.
Dr. Mordecai is Co-Managing Member of Numerati® Partners and advises research activities at RiskEcon® Lab @ Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU.
About Numerati® Partners LLC
Numerati® Partners LLC coordinates a data analytics and technology development ecosystem, with the mission of advancing and fostering the next generation of scalable data-intensive risk and liability management enterprises. The firm provides resources fundamental to advancing the development of nascent leading-edge inferential surveillance, monitoring, and predictive analytics technologies for deployment within the RiskTech domain: risk technologies associated with adaptive distributed, networked and embedded systems such as remote sensing, agent-oriented data analytics, computing and control systems. Numerati® Partners curates integrated RiskTech solutions as well as forensic and use-case applications in RiskTech sub-domains such as LitTech, RegTech, FinTech and InsurTech (litigation technology, regulation technology, financial technology and insurance technology).
About RiskEcon® Lab @ Courant Institute
The mission of RiskEcon® Lab for Decision Metrics @ Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU is the development of experimental testbeds and analytics that employ high-dimensional datasets from innovative sources by applying a range of computational and analytical methods to commercial and industrial sensor networks and edge-computing for distributed, embedded and autonomous systems, focusing primarily on research and development (R&D) of remote and compressed sensing, anomaly detection, forensic analytics and statistical process control. By employing applied computational statistics within the context of robust and scalable data analytic solutions, our goal is robust integration of machine learning with signal processing for measurement and control, in order to conduct research fundamental to large-scale, real-world questions in risk and liability management.
RiskEcon® Lab enables, facilitates and coordinates academic research focusing on these patterns and trends, through the development of commercially-viable, analytic applications employing computational statistical tools in conjunction with innovative and non-traditional data structures. In addition, the Lab’s activities involve the advancement of applied mathematical statistics and computational economics, through interdisciplinary post-doctoral, postgraduate, graduate research and education in data science and social computing in the public interest.
Synopsis: Drone technology has been rapidly advancing in recent years primarily due to improvements in constrained computational capabilities and algorithmic development. Drone swarms offer advantages relative to single drone deployment, in terms of fault-tolerance, adaptability and scalability. Drone swarms also offer applications in the fields of mapping, inspection, surveillance etc. This project explores tradeoffs related to optimal coverage of a simulation environment with adaptive motion planning using autonomous drone swarms.
Dr. Mordecai is Co-Managing Member of Numerati® Partners and advises research activities at RiskEcon® Lab @ Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU.

About Numerati® Partners LLC
Numerati® Partners LLC coordinates a data analytics and technology development ecosystem, with the mission of advancing and fostering the next generation of scalable data-intensive risk and liability management enterprises. The firm provides resources fundamental to advancing the development of nascent leading-edge inferential surveillance, monitoring, and predictive analytics technologies for deployment within the RiskTech domain: risk technologies associated with adaptive distributed, networked and embedded systems such as remote sensing, agent-oriented data analytics, computing and control systems. Numerati® Partners curates integrated RiskTech solutions as well as forensic and use-case applications in RiskTech sub-domains such as LitTech, RegTech, FinTech and InsurTech (litigation technology, regulation technology, financial technology and insurance technology).
About RiskEcon® Lab @ Courant Institute
The mission of RiskEcon® Lab for Decision Metrics @ Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU is the development of experimental testbeds and analytics that employ high-dimensional datasets from innovative sources by applying a range of computational and analytical methods to commercial and industrial sensor networks and edge-computing for distributed, embedded and autonomous systems, focusing primarily on research and development (R&D) of remote and compressed sensing, anomaly detection, forensic analytics and statistical process control. By employing applied computational statistics within the context of robust and scalable data analytic solutions, our goal is robust integration of machine learning with signal processing for measurement and control, in order to conduct research fundamental to large-scale, real-world questions in risk and liability management.
RiskEcon® Lab enables, facilitates and coordinates academic research focusing on these patterns and trends, through the development of commercially-viable, analytic applications employing computational statistical tools in conjunction with innovative and non-traditional data structures. In addition, the Lab’s activities involve the advancement of applied mathematical statistics and computational economics, through interdisciplinary post-doctoral, postgraduate, graduate research and education in data science and social computing in the public interest.