The Department is pleased to welcome new secondary faculty member Silvia Ferrari, Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Controls at Duke University. A professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, Ferrari came to Duke in 2002 after completing her PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton.

“I’m looking forward to advising CS graduate students and interacting more closely with the faculty,” says Ferrari. Her popular spring engineering course, “Intelligent Systems,” which already attracts many CS students, will soon be cross-listed in the CS Department.

An aerospace engineer by training, Ferrari combines methods from computer science, artificial intelligence, engineering, and even neuroscience to tackle problems in optimal control theory and to design intelligent control systems—automated decision-making processes that seek to minimize the cost or maximize the utility of a system. Already a faculty member in both the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences, Ferrari keeps quite busy. In 2009, she and collaborators published six papers in IEEE Transactions journals, and in October, Ferrari received a $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to advance applications of her research in neuroscience—an innovative new approach to develop algorithms to train biological neurons. Engineering systems like aerospace and robotics have difficulty responding to novel challenges, but neurons are experts at adapting. Because they can be grown in Petri dishes and trained by light patterns, Ferrari and collaborators plan to evaluate neuronal systems as they adapt to challenging situations and apply that information to artificial systems.