Meet Assistant Professor Zachary Sunberg
Zachary Sunberg is joining Smead Aerospace in January 2020 as a new Assistant Professor. He is currently completing the final few months of a postdoctoral scholarship with Claire Tomlin at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zachary's doctoral work shows how partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) can be used to model state uncertainty, allowing autonomous vehicles to reason about how safe their actions will be given the information they have observed about the environment and other actors. His research in this area has yielded new algorithms and demonstrated that they can be used in complex scenarios that could be encountered in the real world. These algorithms are applicable to problems that are provably unsolvable by previous approaches, and they scale to domains that are much larger than those commonly solved by conventional methods.
In his postdoctoral work, Zachary is analyzing the convergence of POMDP algorithms in problems with continuous observation spaces and studying how active information gathering can improve safety when autonomous vehicles operate in new environments and configurations.
Before earning his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics with Mykel Kochenderfer at Stanford University in 2018, He received his BS and MS degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University. At Texas A&M, his research focused on developing new algorithms for tracking satellites and emergency autorotation of helicopters, including successfully testing an autonomous autorotation control system on a large remote control helicopter.
Zachary received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2012, serves as the lead maintainer of the POMDPs.jl Julia package, has worked with AI4ALL to improve access to artificial intelligence education for underrepresented groups since 2015, and is a native Coloradan and avid skier.