H Vincent Vincent Poort

My current research activities are focused on advances in several fields of rapid technology development, notably wireless networks and energy systems, and on the fundamentals underlying them, including information theory, stochastic analysis and machine learning. The dramatic increase in demand for new capacity and higher performance has consistently been a major issue in the design and deployment of wireless networks. It is expected that emerging generations of wireless standards and applications will address this issue through the use of techniques such as spectrum sharing, semantic communications, and the incorporation of AI into wireless network design and operation. Our recent work has focused on these and related techniques, examining the fundamental limits of new wireless paradigms through information theoretic and related analyses of problems such as high-reliability and low-latency communications, the ability of the physics of the radio channel to provide security in data transmission, the use of wireless networks as platforms for machine learning, joint communications and sensing in wireless networks, and the incorporation of neuromorphic structures into wireless networks. Our work in energy systems has focused on smart grid, which has emerged as a key technology for improving the efficiency, efficacy and security of the distribution and consumption of electric power, and particularly for the integration of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power into the electricity grid. Our work in this area has focused on several issues arising in this context, including the detection and amelioration of bad data and physical attacks on the grid, the study of privacy issues for both operators and consumers, the characterization of grid resilience through topological data analysis, the study of resilience of renewable power systems under climate risks, and the use of game theory and prospect theory to develop an understanding of the behavior of grid participants in activities such peer-to-peer energy trading. We are also working jointly with colleagues in the life sciences on improved modeling of the spread of epidemics, and on the development of optimal and robust control mechanisms for such spread.