Veeravalli to develop sensor networks for chemical, biological threat detection

2/20/2013 Elise King, CSL Communications

CSL Professor Venu Veeravalli recently received a 3-year, $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop theories and algorithms for detecting chemical and biological threats in sensor systems.

Written by Elise King, CSL Communications

CSL Professor Venu Veeravalli recently received a 3-year, $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop theories and algorithms for detecting chemical and biological threats in sensor systems.

Venu Veeravalli
Venu Veeravalli
Venu Veeravalli

The grant is part of a new joint program between NSF and the Defense Threats Reduction Agency. Veeravalli is the principle investigator at Illinois and will be working in collaboration with Alex Tartakovsky, a professor in the math department at the University of Southern California.

“The goal of this program is to develop techniques that will create mathematical and statistical algorithms for use in sensor systems for detecting chemical and biological agents or materials," said Veeravalli, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. "This should help protect people in the U.S. as well as military personnel deployed abroad from chemical and biological threats."

There are two thrusts to this project. The first deals with the statistical framework for looking at these problems, which is called multi-decision quickest-change detection. “The idea is that … if you’re observing something through a sensing system, and there’s a sudden change in the statistics of the observations, these algorithms should be able to quickly detect the change,” Veeravalli said.

Keeping the false alarm rate small is important when using this framework. “You’re going to make mistakes sometimes, but you don’t want to make too many mistakes,” Veeravalli said. The goal is to, while keeping false alarm rate minimal, detect an event as quickly as possible “so that there’s enough time for people to do something about it, or to get out of the way,” he said.

The second part of the project involves applying these algorithms to the type of sensing networks that detect these threats.

Veeravalli and Tartakovsky have had several grants on related topics in the past, and have worked together for almost 15 years. However, this is their first grant that is funded through the math division of NSF. Veeravalli’s primary research area at CSL is in communications, and his research interests include sensor networks, information theory, wireless communication and detection and estimation theory.


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This story was published February 20, 2013.