Professor · Founder · Researcher
I build AI systems in places where mistakes carry real consequences.
I'm Tim Darrah, Assistant Professor of Practice in Vanderbilt University's College of Connected Computing and Co-Founder of Mangrove.
Army veteran, former NASA Fellow, and PhD in computer science. I'm a complex systems thinker and have spent my career building AI systems in high-risk environments where mistakes carry real consequences.
Now
- Vanderbilt. Teaching AI 5100, Foundations of Generative AI, the first course in the MS in AI, plus DS 1000 and DS 6120.
- Mangrove. AI-powered digital asset infrastructure for wealth management and agentic finance.
- Research. AI reliability, self-improving systems, knowledge structures, and alignment.
Writing
All writing →- How Mangrove finds strategies that fit your styleSubstack ↗
I published a white paper describing how we map survey results to strategy types, and discuss that paper below.
- The AI arms race is nothing like the Cold War
A decade of building AI in safety critical environments, and why every way AI fails comes down to misuse, misunderstood use, or misguided use.
Selected research
All publications →- Predicting Strategy Outcomes from Indicator Composition: A Classification ApproachPreprint, 2026DOI
- Survey-Based Strategy SelectionTechnical paper, Mangrove Technologies, 2026PDF
- An On-Board Off-Board Framework for Online Replanning: Applied to UAVs in Urban Environments16th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), 2024
- A Health-Aware Replanning Framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Stochastic EnvironmentsPhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University (advisor: Gautam Biswas), 2023
- A Data-Centric Approach to the Study of System-Level Prognostics for Cyber Physical Systems: Application to Safe UAV OperationsJournal of Surveillance, Security and Safety, 2022DOI