By Laura Williams
Studying robot interactions is not typically a career path that leads to a central role in infrastructure security – after all, the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t trust just anyone with vital information about the nation’s critical structures.

Unlikely though it was, it was exactly that research interest that led Milind Tambe, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California, to a project helping the U.S. Coast Guard create a complex patrol schedule that the Port of Boston has been piloting for the past month.

In...