Tannenbaum's research covered numerous areas, including robust control, computer vision, biomedical imaging, and bioinformatics, totaling almost 500 publications.
Tannenbaum used techniques from elliptic curves to show that the reachability does not imply pole assignability for systems defined over polynomial rings in two or more variables over an arbitrary field.
He pioneered the application of Earth Mover’s Distance from Optimal Mass Transport (OMT) theory and related metrics to image analysis problems and network data, including cancer systems biology, and has published numerous seminal works in this area.
In recent work, he developed techniques using graph curvature ideas for analyzing the robustness of complex networks, with many applications to cancer genomic analysis.
[5] In the next years he held overlapping longer-term full professorships, from 1986 to 2002 at the University of Minnesota, from 1989 to 1992 and 2005 to 2010 at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and from 1999 to 2011 as Julian Hightower Professor of Electrical/Computer and Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech.