Asmaa Eldesoukey Receives Outstanding Student Paper Award
Jan. 7, 2025 - UC Irvine mechanical and aerospace engineering graduate student Asmaa Eldesoukey won the 2024 Outstanding Student Paper award from the IEEE Control Systems Society. The award was announced at the IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control in December 2024 in Milan, Italy. Co-authored by Distinguished Professor Tryphon Georgiou and postdoctoral fellow Olga Movilla Miangolarra, the paper extends an idea by Erwin Schrödinger, the founder of Quantum Mechanics, in order to construct models for stochastic flows that interpolate spatio-temporal statistics.
In the early 1930s, Schrödinger was in search of general principles that explain time reversibility in physical laws. In the process, he developed the maximum likelihood method and large deviations theory, before the relevant theories took shape in statistics and probability theory.
In the paper, the UCI researchers develop analogous equations to those of Schrödinger, now referred to as Schrödinger's Bridge, that help explain stochastic evolutions in a way that is in agreement with statistics obtained over a spatial domain and distributed over time.
“The work of Asmaa and Olga brings out an interesting twist that pertains to stochastic models that include losses,” said Georgiou. “Such stochastic models are especially suitable for a variety of complex phenomena that are ubiquitous in nature, including pattern formation, biological processes, and ecological dynamics.”
The IEEE Conference on Decision and Control Outstanding Student Paper Award recognizes research in which the student is the first contributing author.
– Lori Brandt
