The lab
RAIL is a small group at William & Mary working at the intersection of machine learning, planning under uncertainty, and public-interest systems. We collaborate closely with students and faculty at Vanderbilt, Cornell, the University of Houston, and George Mason.
Faculty
Ayan Mukhopadhyay
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
I work on robust, adaptive, and interpretable decision-making for cyber-physical systems, with applications in emergency response, transportation, energy, public health, and conservation.
Before this, I was a senior research scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, and before that a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab at Stanford University, working under Mykel Kochenderfer, where I was awarded the 2019 CARS post-doctoral fellowship by the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford.
Before joining Stanford, I was a PhD student at Vanderbilt University’s Computational Economics Research Lab under Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, working on decision-theoretic and machine-learning approaches to multi-agent planning. My thesis was nominated for the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2020.
I am honored to be a Google AI Impact Scholar (2021) for Social Good.
William & Mary
PhD students
Liakot Babu
PhD Student, Computer Science
Online planning for transportation.
Jay Li
PhD Student, Computer Science
Decision-making under non-stationarity.
Siqi Lu
PhD Student, Computer Science
Explainable planning and decision-making.
Aryan Samantaray
PhD Student, Computer Science
Multi-agent planning.
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Your name here
Open position
We are recruiting PhD students for Fall 2027.
William & Mary
Master's & undergraduate researchers
Hellen Nguyen
Master's Student, Computer Science
Combinatorial optimization.
Service
Thesis committees
PhD students at Vanderbilt University whose dissertation committees I served on.
BLBaiting LuoNon-stationary decision-making, temporal abstraction
RSRishav SenVehicle-to-building integration, neuro-symbolic control
Beyond W&M
Collaborators
Groups we work with regularly, across institutions.
SCOPE Lab
Vanderbilt University · led by Prof. Abhishek Dubey
We collaborate closely with the SCOPE Lab at Vanderbilt. I spent five years there before joining William & Mary, and we continue to work together on multiple projects.
Lab life
Photos
Group photos, conference trips, field visits, and whatever else is worth keeping.
Join us
Prospective PhD students should apply to the William & Mary Computer Science program and mention RAIL in their statement.