Asok Ray earned the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, MA in 1976, and also graduate degrees in each of the disciplines of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science.   Dr. Ray joined the Pennsylvania State University in July 1985, and is currently a University Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics, a Graduate Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and a Graduate Faculty of Nuclear Engineering.   Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Ray held research and academic positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie-Mellon University as well as management and research positions at GTE Strategic Systems Division, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and MITRE Corporation.   Dr. Ray is a naturalized citizen of USA since 1976.

Dr. Ray's original work has opened three new areas of multi-disciplinary science & technology, which bear significant importance to the theory and practice of several scientific and engineering disciplines in both defense and commercial sectors.

The first research area is Dr. Ray's most recent contributions to the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, instrumentation & control, detection & estimation, and signal processing. This research area has focused on anomaly detection and statistical pattern recognition based on the theories of symbolic dynamics, discrete-event systems, and statistical mechanics, which have found applications in different fields of science and engineering. Specifically, this research has led to the development of new technologies such as those for remote diagnosis and prognosis of air, water, and land platforms for both defense and commercial applications.

From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Ray was the Principal Investigator of a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the United States Department of Defense (DoD). This MURI grant was awarded to Pennsylvania State University and collaborators (Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and Louisiana Tech) by the Army Research Office (ARO) in the area of Mathematics of Failures to conduct theoretical and experimental research on characterization and mitigation of anomalous behavior in complex dynamical systems. From 2007 to 2014, Dr. Ray was one of the three thrust leaders in another MURI grant from the Army Research Office (ARO) to conduct theoretical and experimental research on dynamic modeling and control of sensor networks. This research project, jointly with researchers from Penn State, Harvard, Duke, and Ohio State, developed fundamental methods for fusing widely different asynchronous signals from heterogeneous sensors for information fusion with applications to urban warfare.

In addition, Dr. Ray was one of the grantees in the DARPA Information Exploitation Office (IXO) program on Command & Control - Mixed Initiative Control of Automa-Teams (MICA). From June 2009 to December 2012, Dr. Ray was the Principal Investigator of a multidisciplinary multi-University research project in the field of Science of Autonomy funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), where the research activities focused on: (i) Autonomous Perception & Intelligent Decision-making, and (ii) Scalable & Robust Distributed Collaboration, based on the fundamental principles of Information Theory, Statistical Mechanics, and Automata Theory. Related to these research efforts, Dr. Ray had been one of the grantees in the PLUS-INP Program of the U.S. Navy that dealt with actual undersea operations (e.g., mine countermeasure (MCM) and antisubmarine warfare (ASW)).

These technologies have been transferred to industry through several Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) projects for field applications in several DoD sites (e.g., NAVAIR and NAVSEA) and NASA sites (e.g., NASA Glenn Research Center and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center). Since 2012, Dr. Ray has been a senior research personnel for a five-year multi-disciplinary research program on dynamic data-driven application systems (DDDAS) dealing with automatic target detection and surveillance for border security; this project was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The experimental part of this research was supported by an additional defense university research instrumentation program (DURIP) grant. To support these research projects, Dr. Ray and his students & colleagues have established a network-based robotic system laboratory (http://nrsl.mne.psu.edu/) under several consecutive (2002-2019) DURIP grants.

The second research area addresses the field of life extending control of dynamical systems for structural durability, pioneered by Dr. Ray in early 1990's for the NASA Space Shuttle Main Engine and different types of commercial aircraft, which demonstrates the power of Information Science & Technology (IST)-based cross-disciplinary research in decision & control science, computer science, electromechanical science, thermal science, and material science.

This research on life extending control has addressed performance optimization, enhancement of structural durability, and (partially autonomous) self-healing control of aerospace structures and electromechanical systems by modeling the physics of material characteristics under dynamical environments perceived through a network of embedded sensors. Consequently, life extending control (also known as damage mitigating control) is considered essential for safe, reliable and economical operation of aging aircraft by NASA and Air Force, and also for complex electromechanical systems like the Smart Ship by the Navy. From 1987 to 2013, Dr. Ray had been the principal investigator of several NASA research projects in Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) and Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) for safety enhancement of spacecraft and commercial aircraft. In a research project with NASA Glenn Research Center, Dr. Ray has implemented this concept of anomaly detection in gas turbine engines based on the principles of Symbolic Dynamics and Information Theory. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Ray also extended the concepts of IVHM and IRAC to military rotorcraft and fixed-wing aircraft under several SBIR and STTR projects of DoD, NASA and DoE. Recently, Dr. Ray had been the principal investigator of a six-year (2015-2021) AFOSR research project on dynamic data-driven application systems (DDDAS) for prediction and control of lean-blow-out and combustion instabilities in aircraft gas turbine engines. This project focused on theoretical and experimental research in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and decision & control.   

The third research area is Dr. Ray's earlier work (1987-1994) on Integrated Communication and Control (ICCS). The role of ICCS is to coordinate and perform inter-related functions ranging from real-time multi-loop control to information monitoring and decision support. In ICCS, a feedback control loop is closed via a common communication channel that multiplexes real-time information from sensor to controller and controller to actuator along with data traffic from other control loops and management functions. This research work is another contribution that has found wide acceptance in the international community. For example, the U.S. Army has pursued this research area through several Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grants in the field of Sensor Networks. This research has addressed the issues of performance degradation and potential instability in the closed loop systems, resulting from time-varying and possibly stochastic delays due to asynchronous time-division multiplexing in the network protocol. These innovative theoretical concepts were experimentally validated first in the laboratory environment and subsequently on various platforms including the MIT nuclear reactor, MITR-II. Following Dr. Ray's original work, Westinghouse Electric developed a signal validation software that is currently used in commercial nuclear reactors.

Mentorship Role: In addition to his contributions as an Engineer/Scientist, Dr. Ray has excelled as an educator and a mentor in his professional career of more than forty years.   Dr. Ray has been consistently working on enhancement of the standard of interdisciplinary graduate education in Mechanical, Electrical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering. Along this line, Dr. Ray introduced several interdisciplinary graduate courses encompassung the fields of Applied Mathematics, Optimization & Control, Signal Processing & Pattern Recognition, Information Theory, and Chaos & nonliear Dynamics. Specifically, Dr. Ray has been a strong advocate for the role of modern mathematics and information sciences in engineering education. Dr. Ray, along with his colleagues, developed the Dynamical systems & Control Laboratory for experimental studies in several senior-level and graduate-level Mechanical Engineering courses in the fields of Modeling, Control & Estimation, Signal Processing, and Robotics.

At Penn State, Dr. Ray has supervised about twenty post-doctoral scholars, sixty one doctoral dissertations, and over one hundred twenty master theses or projects.    His former students are currently holding or have held academic positions in many U.S. and foreign universities, and research positions in organizations like: Argonne National Research Laboratory, Boeing High Technology Center, Bosch North America, General Electric Global Research Center at USA and abroad, General Motors Research Laboratories, Google Reseach Laboratory, IBM Watson Research Center, Idaho National Research Laboratory, Mitsubishi Research Center, Naval Research Laboratory, Oakridge National Research Laboratory, Raytheon Reseach Laboratory, Siemens Research Center, and United Technology Research Center at USA and abroad. . 

More than seven hundred research publications (including over three hundred and thirty-seven scholarly articles in refereed journals and over twenty-five chapters in research monographs) and about sixty technical reports based on sponsored research.