URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2016_Melissa-McCarthy

“We really hope our research, in certain ways, will change human lives and improve our quality of life.” - Haibo He

Haibo He Robert Haas Endowed Chai r Professor, Electr ical Engineer ing

super excited,” He says. “They said, ‘Wow this could really be something if it really works.’” Though the computational intelligence work He is doing has a targeted application, if he can create an intelligent algorithm to control the robots, he foresees a multitude of uses. He believes robots could fill jobs from industrial manufacturing to food service. In addition to his work with the human-robot interaction project, He has received accolades for his work with increasing the reliability and security of the United States electric grid and was named a rising star innovator of the year by Providence Business News in 2011, and also a prestigious NSF CAREER award that same year. Working through a grant from the NSF, He is analyzing the electric grid for weak spots to prevent mass power outages caused by weather or cyber attacks. By analyzing data purchased from electric companies, He and his graduate students are working to predict the impact of electrical power outages. However, He says as the electrical

power grid is one of the largest interconnected complex systems on Earth, making these predictions proves difficult. “We want to understand if this particular power line fails, what kind of area will lose power and how the outage will propagate,” He says. “Then we can make intelligent decisions in advance to prevent a large-scale cascading failure.” In addition to these projects, He is leading a team of about 20 people, including Ph.D. students, post-docs, and visiting scholars, working on a wide range of projects from deep learning to big data analytics. Recently, He has also been selected by the IEEE through a global- search process to be the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, a top journal in the field. “We are having lots of fun on all these projects,” He says. “We really hope our research, in certain ways, will change human lives and improve our quality of life.”

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