Ph.D. candidate Anastasia Bizyaeva shares her thoughts on what it means to be a Princeton Engineer!
As a member of Professor Naomi Leonard’s Dynamical Control Systems Lab, Anastasia creates models and algorithms of group opinion dynamics, which are inspired by collective behaviors of natural systems, like groups of animals and groups of interconnected neurons.
These models can be useful for programming robot teams to perform jobs such as search-and-rescue missions where the individual robots must act collectively as they react to emerging situations. She also participates in interdisciplinary collaborations, including one with scientists at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, which looks at ways of understanding human cognition from a mathematical, dynamical systems approach.
One of the most interesting things to her about her work is seeing how universal certain ideas are. She said that studying collective behaviors in animals and neurons translates to thinking about social groups and "to control protocols that I design, which are meant for artificial systems, like robots, or smart cars or whatever it may be down the line, who knows?"
"The universality of the mathematical tools we uses to describe very different systems really stands out to me because it's kind of beautiful, seeing connections between very unexpected things that are quite similar in principle,” she said.
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