Home Page: Damian M. Lyons

Universitas Fordhamensis Picture of me taken by Brian Damian M. Lyons
Associate Professor
Department of Computer &Information Science
320A John Mulcahy Hall
Fordham University
441 E.Fordham Rd.
Bronx NY 10458
PH: (718) 817-4485 FX: (718) 817-4488
EM: dlyons(at)cis.fordham.edu

Bio

Dr. Damian M. Lyons is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Fordham University. He is the Director of Fordham's Robotics and Computer Vision Laboratory. Dr. Lyons has undergraduate degrees in Math (B.A.,1980) and Electrical Engineering (B.A.I., 1980) and a master's degree in Computer Science (M.Sc., 1981) from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland. He earned his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Ph.D., 1986).

Dr. Lyons' research interests are in Robotics and Computer Vision. In Computer Vision, his interests include target tracking, camera handoff, multisensory fusion and behavior recognition. In robotics his interests include formal approaches to plan and program representation and analysis and hybrid deliberative-reactive systems. His background includes over 15 years as a researcher and research program manager at the US division of Philips corporate research laboratories; he was Department head for the Video and Display Processing research department, responsible for technical leadership and funding for this diverse group, and project leader for Philips' research activities in Automated Video Surveillance. He joined Fordham in 2002, and served as chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at Fordham from 2006 to 2011. He has served on numerous program committees, has published over 80 technical papers in conferences, journals and books, and is inventor/co-inventor of 13 US patents. Dr. Lyons is a member of ACM and IEEE.

Fordham Robotics and Computer Vision Laboratory `Virtual Stand`

Interested in doing Robotics and/or Computer Vision research? Follow this link!

Interested in Robot Competitions? Follow this link!

(The currently inactive Fordham IGVC team page is here )

Teaching | Research | FRCV Lab TWiki | Publications | Links

Teaching

Spring 2013:

CISC 3600 Robotics
CISC 3593 Computer Organization

Fall 2012:

CISC 3595 Operating Systems
CISC 6525 Artificial Intelligence

Spring 2012:

CISC 3593 Computer Organization
CISC 2540 Video Game Design

Fall 2011:

CISC 3595 Operating Systems
CISC 6575 Parallel Computation

Spring 2011:

CISC 3593 Computer Organization

Fall 2010:

CISC 3595 Operating Systems
CISC 4800 Projects and Internship

Spring 2010 (on sabbatical)

Fall 2009:

CISC 4080 Computer Algorithms
CISC 6400 Robotics and Animation

Back to the top

Research

My research interests are in Robotics and Computer Vision, in particular for systems that operate robustly in the same kind of dynamic and unstructured environments as humans. I am interested in the principles of perceptual systems that combine diverse channels of information about the robot and its environment in the service of behaviors such as target tracking, navigation, wayfinding and exploration. I conduct work in both the theoretical and experimental aspects of this problem domain. My approach is influenced by Arbib's perceptual and motor schema theory, by behavior-based systems as pioneered by Brooks, and by hybrid deliberative-reactive systems as championed by Arkin.

I work in the Fordham Robotics and Computer Vision (FRCV) Lab and my previous and current projects are described there.
Currently I'm involved in four pieces of work:

Performance guarantees for probabilistic robot systems: Joint work with Ron Arkin of Georgia Tech developing software to build probabilistic robot control algorithms using GATech`s MissionLab and formal models of robot programs.
Terrain Spatial Histograms: A novel approach to Landmark Representation for robot teams
ADAPT: an architecture for cognitive robotics: joint work with D. Paul Benjamin of Pace Univ. Currently we are looking at ways to compare real and synthetic video so as to `synch` a robots visual information with a 3D graphical model of the terrain (using the game engine OGRE).
An energy-efficient approach to legged locomotion, the rotopod.
A combinatorial approach to sensory fusion for target tracking, camera handoff and navigation (with D. Frank Hsu)

I am especially interested in how cluster computing (Beowulf computing) can be applied to robot architecture and algorithms. We are using an HPC of 11 dual processor quad core Intel Xeon E5462s for implementing and evaluating various robot and computer vision algorithms (88 cores).

Interested in doing Robotics and/or Computer Vision research? Follow this link!

Publications

For a full list, see here .

See my new book: Cluster Computing for Robotics and Computer Vision (click on the image):

Click here for more information on the 2^nd edition of the Fundamentals of Discrete Structures (Lyons, Papadakis-Kanaris, Weiss & Werschulz) text (click on the image for the amazon page)

Patents

For a full list, see here

Back to the top

Additional Links:

Back to the top

LastUpdated 7/12 dlyons