Richard Sowers

This is an exciting time in engineering and mathematics.  The complexity of the world requires the ability to think quantitatively and handle large amounts of data.

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The Diagnostic Gait

 

Butterfly Diagrams

Can we diagnose Multiple Sclerosis from gait patterns?

/ Excerpt

The Smart and Frugal Home

Flowchart for optimal Scheduling of large residential appliances

Can the Smart home also be frugal?

/ Excerpt

Topology of Traffic Congestion

Lift of cycle in Rips complex
Lift of cycle in Rips complex

Roads and traffic make complex networks. Can we find robust patterns of congestion in a city?

/ Excerpt, Traffic Patterns

Time for Accidents

Time for Accidents
Routing with accidents and time in New York City

How much time would you have to give up to avoid accidents?  We combined some datasets from New York City to understand this tradeoff

/ Excerpt, Traffic Patterns

The Smart Strawberry Field

 

Algorithmic Geolocation of Harvest

 

While many crops already are or are becoming mechanized, many valuable  crops still are hand-picked.    These crops sometimes need new ways to collect precise geospatial harvest data which can then be used to monitor, measure, and optimize what is happening in the field.

Optimal Transport in Hand-Picked Crops

Optimal Transport in Hand-Picked Crops

A number of hIgh-value hand-picked specialty crops are very susceptible to spoilage after they have been picked and while they are waiting to be refrigerated.   We would like to model and minimize this spoilage.

Press release: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/469804

Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty is a crucial factor in financial stability, but it is notoriously difficult to measure. This working paper extends techniques from engineering to quantify fundamental economic uncertainty, and applies the method to an example of portfolio stress testing. By this measure, uncertainty peaked in late 2008.   Preprint.

Dynamics of Bankrupt Stocks

Bankrupt Stocks

Bankrupt stocks are still traded while the court winds the company down.  This creates some interesting dynamics as traders short a finite number of shares of the stock. Preprint.

Stochastic Moving Boundary Problem

Stochastic moving boundary value problem

The dynamics of many multiphase systems are described by moving boundary problems.  What happens if we add noise to these PDE’s? Preprint.

/ Excerpt, Pure Mathematics

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