Prior to his arrival there, he was associate director at the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California (USC). He did his postdoctoral studies at the department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on enviromatics, a new research field that aims to devise mathematical programming methods for machine understanding of trends and behaviors of built and natural environments. This includes environmental distributed sensing (distributed air and water quality monitoring), safety and traffic data realization, and structural sensory networks.