Welcome to my website

I am Anjali Parashar, PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying Mechanical Engineering. I work in the REALM Lab with Professor Chuchu Fan, and my research focuses on testing and evaluation of autonomous systems, with a focus on failure discovery and bechmarking.

Research interests

I use sampling based techniques (gradient-based sampling, black-box MCMC) for testing of simulation based models, and Bayesian Experimental Design (BED) for failure discovery within limited number of samples for real-world systems. I apply Bayesian statistics quite heavily in my research, with applications such as hierarchical Bayesian modelling, BED, sampling based posterior inference, etc. On the application side, I work with manipulation systems, Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) in self-driving, autonomous racing, and Air traffic control. Please visit my projects to view my PhD research.

Previous research experience

Prior to PhD, I did my Master’s thesis under Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy, (M.S. at MIT MechE, 2021-23). During M.S., I explored the intersection of optimization theory and control theory, with a special focus on higher-order optimization methods, projection techniques for constraint satisfaction, with applications to AC power grid optimization problems. During my Bachelor’s thesis, I worked on hydrodynamic design-oriented fault tolerance control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs).

If you have comments, thoughts or questions about any of these topics above, please feel free to reach out at anjalip@mit.edu. I look forward to hearing from you!