My principal research objective is to define and advance the science of technology for developing communities (TFDC); that is, technology relevant to communities where monetary resources are scarce, and the accessible infrastructure and indigenous skills are very different from the norms prevalent in the technologically developed world. My goal is to build technology that empowers these underserved communities in a manner that is culturally relevant and locally sustainable. As a first step in this direction, I founded TechBridgeWorld at Carnegie Mellon University to provide the necessary infrastructure for collaborative work between the university and technologically underserved communities around the world.

My overall goal is to create technology that empowers underserved communities in a manner that is culturally relevant and locally sustainable, and to thereby define and advance the science of TFDC. As a first step in this direction, I founded TechBridgeWorld (www.techbridgeworld.org) at Carnegie Mellon University to provide the necessary infrastructure for collaborative work between the university and underserved communities around the world. TechBridgeWorld extends the benefits of technology to developing communities, thus promoting a novel field of research that uniquely enhances the world we live in. A second important career goal of mine is to advance the state of the art in autonomous team coordination. Much of my work to date with team coordination deals with market-based systems where team members conduct and participate in auctions to allocate tasks and resources. My dissertation work laid the foundation for the TraderBots coordination framework that is now a licensed tool used by several groups for research and development in team coordination. My work in team coordination is relevant to TFDC applications such as disaster relief and some of this work is evolving to explicitly address needs in disaster response.

My vision, engendered in TechBridgeWorld, is to create and foster an environment where technologists together with interdisciplinary global partners can share expertise to cooperatively enable and realize each developing community’s vision of development. Central to this vision is encouraging locally suitable and sustainable development by adhering to each community's vision of progress, thus preserving their ownership of the benefits and consequences of the realized development. Sharing is emphasized for encouraging innovation since technologists have much to learn from the unique challenges faced by underserved communities, and from the solutions these communities have generated to date. Empowerment is emphasized for sustainability since any long-term solution for development must involve empowerment of indigenous populations to create and maintain solutions for overcoming their challenges.

A second research area where I strive to advance the state-of-the-art is autonomous team coordination in dynamic and uncertain environments. My doctoral work produced the conceptual framework and experimental verification that underlies the “TraderBots” software module that allows “market-based” coordination of a team under dynamic conditions. Market-based coordination solves the task-allocation problem in team coordination by creating a virtual economy where the robots are traders, tasks and resources are traded commodities, and allocations are determined via auctions. My work in team coordination continues primarily through the rCommerce Laboratory which I co-founded and co-direct with Professor Anthony Stentz. These two research thrusts are currently unrelated but will most likely intersect in my future aspirations to contribute to effective coordination of limited resources in disaster response.

My goal for autonomous team coordination is to advance the understanding and the science of market-based coordination mechanisms. I am primarily interested in applications of team coordination in uncertain and dynamic conditions, and in enabling robust, intelligent, and effective coordination of limited resources under these conditions using market-based approaches. An important aspect of this work is to understand and enable effective human-robot teams engaged in complex tasks.