10/24/2024 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Melkior Ornik is one of just 24 recipients of a 2025 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program award. They will share approximately $18 million in funding to conduct innovative scientific research that will benefit science and technology development for the Department of the Navy. Ornik is a faculty member in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
His research is titled, "Risk vs. Efficiency vs. Resources: AI-Assisted Planning for Expeditionary Tactical Operations in Denied Environments," with program officer Peter Squire under the category of human performance, training and education.
Ornik explained that denied environments include locations which are uncertain, changing, risky, have limited visibility, etc.
“Ultimately, the project's goal is to enable flexible planning methods for teams of human or autonomous agents that operate on missions in denied or complicated environments and need to quickly adapt their strategies to new observations and new challenges,” Ornik said. “The goal is both to automate this planning, but also provide the human planner/operator/commander with a high-level understanding of the situation, allowing them to quickly consider the trade-off between agent risk and mission efficiency, or the necessary capabilities of the agents that they need to put into the field to successfully complete the mission.”
The Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program award is a highly competitive popular early-career award program which requires prior academic achievement and demonstrated potential for significant scientific breakthroughs as part of the evaluation criteria.
Ornik has proven expertise at developing theory and algorithms for motion and mission planning in complex, changing, and uncertain environments, with possible adversarial elements or imperfect decision-making driven by human unpredictability.
According to the ONR YIP press release about the award, it was established in 1985 and is one of the nation’s oldest and most selective basic-research, early-career awards in science and technology. Its purpose is to fund tenure-track academic researchers, or equivalent, whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development.
YIP awards support postdoctoral and graduate student stipends and scholarships, the acquisition of laboratory equipment, and other expenses critical to the planned research.