Matthew Cleaveland, advised at Penn by Professor George Pappas and Professor Insup Lee, is now a member of Lincoln Laboratory’s technical staff at MIT. As a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), MIT’s Lincoln Lab primarily works with the Department of Defense (DoD).
“The role of the lab is to transition the novel research from academia to the DoD, primarily through rapid prototyping,” Cleaveland explains. In this capacity, Cleaveland works in the Integrated Missile Defense Group. “We have an autonomous systems research group that focuses on using formal methods to enable safe deployment of large scale teams of autonomous systems. We develop enabling swarm, team, and agent level autonomy.”
Currently, Cleaveland’s work focuses on two projects. Safe and adaptable swarm coordination (SAS-C) represents the first. The second focuses on trajectory prediction. As the project lead for SAS-C, Cleaveland works with Professors Chucha Fan from MIT and Professor Kevin Leahy at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). “We are developing techniques to enable small teams of agents to safely coordinate without radio communications, which are very easy to jam in the field,” Cleaveland says. “This project makes use of safe multi-agent reinforcement learning and vision based communication.”
As for the trajectory prediction project, Cleaveland collaborates with Professor Roberto Tron at Boston University (BU). Incidentally, Tron completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Penn with Professor Kostas Danilidis, Cleaveland notes. “We are trying to leverage signal temporal logic formulae to get more accurate trajectory prediction,” Cleaveland says, adding, “this project is closely related to the conformal prediction work I did during my PhD.” Subsequently, Cleaveland has applied conformal prediction methods to the trajectory prediction project.
Presently, Cleaveland has two papers under review at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) as well as two at the American Control Conference (ACC).
When Cleaveland isn’t working, he enjoys watching sports, running and traveling. Cleaveland roots for the British soccer team, Hotspur, Duke Basketball, and the Eagles. Since moving to Boston, Cleaveland has joined a few running clubs and recently ran the Boston Athletic Association Half Marathon. As for traveling, in addition to attending conferences, Cleaveland takes one international trip each year. “I’m actually on my way to India for a wedding.”
Learn more about Cleaveland’s work here