Dr. Alec Koppel is a Research Scientist for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in June of 2017, after which he began work as a Research Scientist for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, MD as part of the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD). His research agenda focuses on the development of new stochastic optimization, estimation, and approximation algorithms for large-scale or dynamic learning tasks. These problems are especially common in autonomous systems, power systems, communication networks, and finance. His research focuses on developing new optimization-based methods for learning from streaming data, motivated primarily by autonomous systems. His recent work has emphasized making nonparametric and Bayesian methods scalable in the online setting. He also pursues foundational work in reinforcement learning. These threads are part of the U.S. Army's Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Essential Research Program. He is based in the United States. Apart from research, his educational goals are to mentor aspiring researchers at the undergraduate and graduate level and develop core competencies via project-based learning that gives students hands-on experience with messy real-world engineering problems. He is always hunting for student contributors.
