Welcome

Alelab is the signal and information processing research lab at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Our research program is organized around the theme of Distributed Collaborative Intelligence. That is, around the development of the technology that is necessary to build groups of autonomous agents that act in a manner we can call intelligent without necessarily relying on central coordination.

While multiple perspectives are possible, our vision at Alelab is that the key to enable group intelligence lies in understanding and engineering network interactions. For a team to collaborate autonomously they need to communicate with each other. This is a problem we address in our research on Wireless Autonomous Networks. The data that a collaborative team acquires is not characterized by the neat regular structure of time and space but rather has irregular structure that we describe with a graph (or network). Processing the data that is acquired by a network requires development of tools for doing Machine Learning on Network Data. If we have learnt how to communicate autonomously and have also learnt to process the data that is acquired by the team, we still face the challenge of processing data and designing behaviors without relying on centralized coordination. The third research thrust in Alelab is the invention of algorithms for Distributed Collaborative Learning.

Dear Colleagues

Thanks for visiting! This website provides easy access to our group’s research. Please visit our research page for a high level description of how the different things we do fit together. If you are looking for a specific paper please refer to our list of publications. The lab’s google scholar profile does a better job at keeping an up to date list of publications although it doesn’t distinguish between journals and conferences.

What we hope you will find most useful is our group’s research blog. The blog does not, in general, contain information that is not already part of some paper. However, we try to make the blog more focused on explaining ideas than on documenting ideas, which is what a paper does. They are therefore easier to read. A cardinal rule of paper writing is to stick to the facts and relegate opinions to sparing sidekicks. Often, this entirely justifiable rule begets the removal of interesting insights that you can get only if we talk in person. The blog is a more liberal format where we act more freely on the expression of insights. Beware though. Insights are not facts, however much hope we have that they are useful and correct.

Dear Students

Thanks for visiting! If you are currently enrolled in one of the courses taught by Alejandro Ribeiro, please use the navigation menu to access the corresponding course’s website. If you are considering registration into one of these courses, you have just read how to access the individual sites. However, you may find it useful to visit the teaching site which contains some digressions on teaching philosophy.

If you are thinking of applying for a position in the group we are honored by your consideration. Please look at our research blog, research page, and list of publications to gain a better idea of what we do and how we do it. If you are still interested after reading, please send Alejandro an email.

Contact Information

If you’ve reached this page chances are you know Alelab is the research group of Alejandro Ribeiro. If you need to contact Alejandro, you can find him in the places listed below.

In person :	411B in 3401 Walnut St. (4th floor)
Email :	aribeiro@seas.upenn.edu
Cell :	(+1) 612 889 9217
Skype :	aribeiro_de_montevideo
Mail:	Dept. of Electrical & Systems Engineering
	University of Pennsylvania
	Room 411B, Warren Center for Data and Network Sciences
	3401 Walnut Street, 4th floor
	Philadelphia, PA 19104