Shivakumar Viswanathan

Current research

I am a postdoc in Robert Sekuler's Vision Lab, and am interested in understanding how visual memory works; and how we perceive and plan motor behavior in various daily situations.

• Viswanathan, S., Perl, D.R., Visscher, K.M., Kahana, M.J., and Sekuler, R., 2008, "Study list homogeneity and visual short-term recognition", under review
• Huang, J., Viswanathan, S., and Sekuler, R., 2008, " Various unattended stimulus attributes leave footprints on visual short-term memory", European Conference on Visual Perception, Utrecht
• Shell,D., Viswanathan, S., Huang, J., Ghosh, R., Huang, J., Mataric, M., Lerman, K., and Sekuler, R., 2007, "Spatial behavior of individuals and groups: Preliminary findings from a museum scenario", "From sensors to human spatial concepts" workshop, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, San Diego.

Prior to that

Evolutionary Computation

I got my PhD at the DEMO lab (advised by Jordan Pollack). The focus was on characterizing the role of representation-dependent effects in Evolutionary Computation. Specifically, I sought to understand the impact of having two independent yet interacting representations as is the case in coevolutionary algorithms and the developmental evolutionary algorithms.

• Viswanathan, S., The secondary substrate problem in Co-Evolution and Developmental-Evolution, PhD Dissertation, Brandeis University, May 2007.
• Viswanathan, S. and Pollack, J.B., 2005, "On the coevolutionary construction of learnable gradients, Coevolutionary and Coadaptive Systems, AAAI Fall Symposium 2005, Washington D.C. [See my dissertation for a definitive version of ideas in this paper]
• Viswanathan, S. and Pollack, J.B., 2005, " How Artificial Ontogenies can retard evolution", SEEDS workshop, at the 2005 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2005), ACM Press, 2005
• Viswanathan, S. and Pollack, J.B., 2005, " On the robustness achievable with stochastic development", The 2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware, IEEE Press, 2005
• Viswanathan, S. and Pollack, J.B., 2004, "Towards an evolutionary-developmental approach for real-world substrates", Proceedings of the ninth international conference on the simulation and synthesis of living systems (Artificial Life IX), Boston, USA (September 2004), pp. 45 - 50, MIT Press

Design for Disassembly (for the design of environment-friendly products)

While getting my MS (advised by Venkat Allada), I worked on a class of computational and geometric problems that arise in the context of Environment Conscious Design. Specifically, (a) how can the suitability of a product for post-life disassembly be automatically and meaningfully evaluated in a principled manner? and (b) how can this evaluation be used to improve the design?

• Viswanathan, S., and Allada, V., 2006, Product configuration optimization for disassembly planning: A differential approach, Omega: The International Journal of Management Science, Special issue on "Reverse Production Systems: Disassembly and other Reverse Manufacturing related practices", Vol 34, No. 6, pp 599-616
• Viswanathan, S., and Allada, V., 2001, Configuration analysis to support product redesign for end-of-life disassembly, International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 39, No. 8, pp. 1733-1753.
• Viswanathan, S., and Allada, V., 1999, A framework for the grouping of products for flexible disassembly, Journal of Electronics Manufacturing, Vol.9, No. 1, pp. 53-66.
• Viswanathan, S., and Allada, V., 2000, Configuration analysis to support product redesign for end-of-life disassembly, Proc. ASME DETC - Design for Manufacturing Conference, Baltimore, MD, Sept. 10-13. [received the Best Paper award]
• Viswanathan, S., and Allada, V., 1999, Value-based product structure evaluation for disassembly, Eco-Design'99: International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, Feb. 1-3, Tokyo, pp. 778-783.
• Investigations in the design of products and factories for end-of-life disassembly, 2001, M.S. Thesis, University of Missouri-Rolla.

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