Home Page: Damian M. Lyons

Universitas Fordhamensis D.M.Lyons Damian M. Lyons
Professor of Computer Science

Department of Computer &Information Science
Room 320 John Mulcahy Hall (JMH)
Fordham University
441 E.Fordham Rd.
Bronx NY 10458

PH: (718) 817-4485 FX: (718) 817-4488

EM: dlyons(at)fordham.edu

Dr. Damian M. Lyons is a Professor of Computer Science at Fordham University. He is the Founder and Director of Fordham's Robotics and Computer Vision Laboratory as well as Director of the CS doctoral program. He has served as Fordham's interim Chief Research Officer/Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs and as Computer and Information Sciences Department Chair.

Dr. Lyons has undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Engineering and a master's degree in Computer Science from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland. He earned his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests are in Robotics, Computer Vision and Software Engineering:

Robotics & Computer Vision: Visual navigation, visual landmarks, agriculture/herding applications, robot program representation and analysis.
Software Engineering: static analysis, multilingual codebases.

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 Department Chair from 2006 to 2011 and as interim Chief Research Office and Associate VP for Academic Affairs for Fordham during the 2015/16 academic year. He has served on numerous program committees, has published over 100 technical papers in conferences, journals and books, and is inventor/co-inventor of 13 US patents. Dr. Lyons is a member of ACM and a life senior member of IEEE.

Teaching

Fall 2024

CISC 7070 RH Research Methods
CISC 3060 RH Introduction to Robotics

Spring 2024

CISC 6525 LC Artificial Intelligence

Fall 2023

CISC 7070 RH Research Methods
CISC 4006 RH Brains & Behaviors in Bots and Beasts
HPRH 1101 Interdisciplinary STEM

Spring 2023

Interim Dept. Chair

Fall 2022

CISC 7070 RH Research Methods
CISC 3060 RH Introduction to Robotics
HPRH 1101 Interdisciplinary STEM

Spring 2022

CISC 6525 LC Artificial Intelligence

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Research

My research interests are in Robotics and in 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 am especially interested in how robotics can support farms, diversify agriculture, and enable competition with large agribusinesses. Currently I focus on a specific but significant requirement for this kind of application: the flexible and robust wide-area navigation required to handle the navigation of robots for livestock management despite the changing visual appearance of the landscape due to weather and growth of vegetation and crops.

Conducting 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 and by hybrid deliberative-reactive systems.

I am the director of the Fordham Robotics and Computer Vision (FRCV) Lab.
Recent projects include:

Wide Area Visual Navigation: Innovative approach to map-less navigation for a team of robots opreating in a visually dynamic workplace. Applications include small-scale precision agriculture, as well as exploration and surveillance in a GPA-denied arena. The approach builds on visual homing as a navigation scheme and extends this to cases where the final destination is not in view (that's our definition of wide-area navigation) and also to generating synchronizedgroup behaviors. This is joint work with Mohamed Rahouti incorporating blockchain as a way to ensure secure and distributed team communication of visual information.
Performance guarantees for probabilistic robot systems: Joint work with Ron Arkin of Georgia Tech developing software to establish performance guarantees for probabilistic robot control algorithms using GATech`s MissionLab and Process Algebra based formal models of robot programs funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).
Multilingual Static Analysis: Leveraging some of the static analysis techniques developed for DTRA, this work addresses open-source analysis tools for software written in multiple, mutually calling languages. This is funded by Bloomberg Corporation NYC.
Stereovision-based Visual Homing: An algorithm that incorporates of stereodepth into bioinspired visual homing, and construction and use of stereo databases to allow extensive testing of such algorithms.

Interested in doing Robotics and/or Computer Vision research? Email: dlyons(at)fordham.edu

Publications

For a full list, see Publications or (downloadable) More Publications, and also Older Publications.

See my 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

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Additional Links:

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LastUpdated 12/23 - dlyons