Karthik Elamvazhuthi, Ph.D.

Control theory and Measure Transport Enthusiast*

Research Interests

Multi-robot Control, Optimal Transport, Machine Learning, Mean Field Control, Diffusion Models

About me

I am fascinated by questions such as how do bees use local feedback to achieve global order and stability without getting at each other’s throats or high stakes squabbling? Can they ever effectively collaborate across scale to provably converge to a peppy title for an academic paper? Would they ever call their highly sophisticated algorithm with sharp convergence guarantees WASP? Are all my worldly non-convex maladies secretly an infinite dimensional linear programming problem in a lifted space of probability measures?

I muse about questions like these to address theoretical and computational aspects of collective behavior in multi-robot systems and machine learning, blending tools from geometric control theory, partial differential equations and optimal transport theory. I do agree that there is no substitute for good theory, except the mountain air and healthy breaks between talks and meetings.