William Hall

Operations Research Center, MIT,
77 Mass Ave, Bldg E40-130,
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel: (617) 258-2416
fax: (617) 258-2555

Degree Expected

PhD, Operations Research, MIT, 1998

Many thanks to Draper Laboratory for providing a fellowship, great projects to work on, and loads of good advice. They've got more projects to work on, so talk to me if you think you might be interested in a Draper Fellowship, or if you're looking for a great job!

Research Interest

Application of OR to the real world is often limited by problem dynamics and uncertainty: part of the problem must be solved before all data are available, and data are not well known in advance. My research addresses these issues in the context of resource allocation problems (such as airport arrival slot allocation) in air traffic flow management. An interesting aspect of these problems is that the objective function information is held by competing interests (the airlines). Getting accurate data from them is only likely if the data are used in their best interests. Here is a paper describing preliminary work.

Education

SM, Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT, 1992

SM thesis on Resource Coordinated Hierarchical Planning for Real-Time Autonomous Systems.

SB, Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT, 1991

Work Experience and NEAT STUFF

I spent three years working at Draper Laboratory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts as engineering staff after I got my Master's. I worked on several OR problems there, including the line planning problem (minimize schedule delay for railroad operations) and various autonomous vehicle planning problems.

In my last year as staff, a co-worker and I started a successful project to build an autonomous helicopter. I designed the electronics and software that interfaced the computer to the helicopter's systems, among other things. I also learned to fly radio control helicopters and became the project's test pilot. Back at school after the first year of that project, I still found time to help design the contest-winning second version of the helicopter, and I designed and wrote the image processing filter that correlates the single-frame image processing results across multiple frames to identify and locate objects on the ground reliably (paper forthcoming).

More Information

Some friends and I rebuilt an Etchells (30-foot sailboat) that was donated to MIT, and raced it in Marblehead for a couple years. Here's a picture of some of us (I'm on the left) taking a breather between races. See the nice deck? We built that, down to the spinnaker sheet block recesses!

I have taken to sailing more respectable (and lower maintenance) boats since then. The Snipe Home Page and the Interclub Dinghy Home Page can tell you all about them.

On a snipe hunt? See snipes.

Check out my Startup Page and my Bookmarks!

ORC HomePage