Ajay Deshpande

Postdoctoral Associate
Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, MIT
Room 35-106
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: +1-617-258-8547
Email: ajayd [at] MIT dot EDU

C.V.

I am a postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I graduated with a PhD from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT in September 2008. My thesis co-advisors are Prof. Sanjay Sarma and Prof. Daniela Rus.

I earned double Master's from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in June 2006. Prior to joining MIT, I graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2001 with B.Tech and M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering with the specialization in Computer Integrated Manufacturing.

Research Interests

My research interest is in the design of large-scale distributed sensing systems with emphasis on sustainability applications in civil infrastructure systems and natural environments. I address problems in sensor placement, sampling, information processing, and control and coordination of sensor actuation. I am interested in theory as well as implementation of sensing systems in application areas such as mapping plumes of pollutants and hazardous gases, monitoring water distribution systems, electricity metering in buildings, thermal imaging of buildings, and minimalistic sampling for macro and micro traffic predictions. I use theoretical tools from sampling theory, estimation theory, cooperative control, optimization, probability theory and computational geometry.

Teaching Experience

In Spring'09, I was an instructor for 2.003. I TA'ed this class in Fall'06, Fall'07 and Spring'08. Besides this, I have mentored a number of undergraduate students in past as part of UROP.

Publications

Journal Papers

  1. A. Deshpande and S. E. Sarma. "Error-tolerant arrangements of sensors for sampling band-limited fields," in preparation.
  2. A. Deshpande, S. Kumar and S. E. Sarma. "Error-tolerant sampling of fields modeled using proper orthogonal decomposition," in preparation.
  3. A. Deshpande, S. E. Sarma and V. K. Goyal. "Generalized regular sampling of trigonometric polynomials and optimal estimation error," accepted in the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, available upon request.

Conference Papers

  1. A. Deshpande and D. Rus. "Coverage and connectivity of naturally mobile sensor networks in rivers," ready for submission, available upon request.
  2. A. Deshpande, S. Poduri, D. Rus and G. S. Sukhatme. "Distributed coverage control for mobile sensors with location-dependent sensing models," accepted in Proceedings of 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Kobe, Japan, May 2009.
  3. S. Poduri, A. Deshpande, D. Rus and G. S. Sukhatme, "Distributed 1D coverage control for a reconfigurable camera network," ImageSense'08, Workshop on Applications, Systems, and Algorithms for Image Sensing, a part of Sensys'08, Rayleigh, North Carolina, November 2008.
  4. A. Deshpande and S. E. Sarma, "Error Tolerant Arrangements of sensors for sampling fields," in Proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC) 2008, Seattle, Washington, June 2008, pages 2401--08.
  5. A. Deshpande, T. Kim, E. D. Demaine, and S. E. Sarma, "A pseudopolynomial time O(log n)-approximation algorithm for art gallery problems," in Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2007), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 4619, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, August 15–-17, 2007, pages 163--174.
  6. A. A. Deshpande and S. S. Pande, "WebNC - Internet based system for intelligent auditing and reverse engineering of CNC part programs," the 30th North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC), May 2002, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, published in NAMRI/SME Transactions 2002, Vol. 30, pages 439--446.

Theses

  1. A. A. Deshpande. "Coverage problems in mobile sensing," Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008.
  2. A. A. Deshpande. "A pseudo-polynomial time O(log^2 n)-approximation algorithm for art gallery problems," S.M. Thesis, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006.
  3. A. A. Deshpande. "Intelligent CNC machining," Dual Degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) Thesis, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 2001.
Last modified: Wed Dec 30 16:02:53 EST 2009