SILO Seminar: Ananya Sen Gupta

What do oil spills, air pollutants, and ocean acoustics have in common? Detection, tracking and classification of environmental signals.

Environmental studies frequently involve understanding complex relationships between interactive components which may be challenging to detect, quantify or analyze using traditional methods. Furthermore, the interactions between the components themselves might be challenging to model or empirically estimate. For example, a fundamental bottleneck to fingerprinting petroleum sampled from an oil-rich region lies in disentangling interconnections between the unique fingerprint of an oil reservoir and the regional characteristics of the locale. Another practical scenario is separating closely spaced sources of pollution in air quality monitoring, even when the primary pollutants are well-identified. Separating the effect of overlapping multipath in coastal acoustics provides similar challenges. Despite phenomenal advances in signal processing and information sciences, understanding and predicting how context-rich information clusters and flows in the environment compels deeper investigation. In my talk, I will focus on some of these challenges, present some case studies from practical applications, and highlight some key aspects of my ongoing research in these broad directions.