Daniel Lazar

I am a PhD student in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Ramtin Pedarsani, and spent this past summer working at Prof. Dorsa Sadigh's' ILIAD lab. I am also a member of the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation (CCDC) at UCSB. I graduated from Washington Univ. in St. Louis in 2014 then worked in wireless communications for a couple years before joining UCSB.

My research focuses on control of transportation networks, specifically when humans drivers and autonomous vehicles share roads. I seek to answer questions along the following lines. What behavior emerges when humans drivers and autonomous vehicles share roads? If granted some level of control over autonomous vehicles (either control on a high-level such as routing or at a low-level, such as the actual path planning), how can we use this to reach a ‘good’ traffic state? Answering these questions involves tools from network control, optimization, game theory, and robotics.

My email is dlazar[at]ucsb[dot]edu.

Preprints

1. D. A. Lazar, S. Coogan, R. Pedarsani, Routing for Traffic Networks with Mixed Autonomy, submitted.

Conference Publications

1. E. Bıyık*, D. Lazar*, R. Pedarsani, and D. Sadigh, Altruistic Autonomy: Beating Congestion on Shared Roads, International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2018.

2. D. Lazar, K. Chandrasekher, R. Pedarsani, D. Sadigh, Maximizing Road Capacity Using Cars that Influence People, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2018. (extended version)

3. D. Lazar, S. Coogan, R. Pedarsani, The Price of Anarchy for Transportation Networks with Mixed Autonomy, IEEE American Control Conference (ACC), 2018.

4. D. Lazar, S. Coogan, R. Pedarsani, Capacity Modeling and Routing for Traffic Networks with Mixed Autonomy, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2017.