David Thorsley

Research Associate
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Washington

thorsley -at- u.washington.edu

About me

I am a postdoc in the Self-Organizing Systems Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, working under the auspices of Eric Klavins.

My research interests are in the theory of stochastic dynamical systems. These types of systems are ubiquitous in engineering and nature, as they occur whenever the behavior of the system is affected by noise. I am interested in developing a framework for the modeling and analysis of stochastic processes that will allow us to design reliable engineered devices in several emerging application areas. I am particularly interested in systems consisting of stochastically interacting parts: at the nanoscale level, these parts may be proteins, nucleic acids, and other molecules inside the cell; at the macroscopic level, these parts may be robots randomly sharing information with each other or even people doing business with each other.

My primary research in this field related to the issues of observation, detection, and diagnosis in stochastic systems. Our ability to predict and control the behavior of many types of systems is limited by our inability to directly observe many modes of the system's behavior. This issue arises when trying to interpret fluorescence data from single-cell experiments and when trying to monitor the performance of chemical and nuclear processes. My recent work in this field is described on the Projects page.

I received my Ph.D. in 2006 from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan under the supervision of Demosthenis Teneketzis. Well before that, I earned a B.E.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Western Ontario in 2000.

Research Interests

  • stochastic control
  • estimation & diagnostics
  • systems biology
  • discrete-event systems
  • hybrid systems
  • multi-robot systems
  • measurement scheduling
  • system identification
  • process control

Contact Information

David Thorsley
Paul Allen Center, RM AE 100R, Box 352500
Seattle, WA 98195-2500
Fax: (206) 543-3842
E-mail: thorsley -at- u.washington.edu

Physical location: CSE 226

Quotations

Spock: I'm having trouble with the sensors.
Kirk: Then deductive reasoning will have to be substituted.

-- Star Trek, "The Lights of Zetar"

Each of them savored his clear superiority over the other--Solodgin because he knew theoretical mechanics, the resistence of materials, and other scientific matters; Spiridon because all material things were obedient to him.

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

Every boy in the streets of Gottingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, in spite of that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.

-- David Hilbert