Abstract: Strategic information transmission refers to a variation (and a substantial one) of the standard paradigm of information transmission in communication (design of an encoder and a decoder in unison to minimize some distortion measure), where now the encoder and the decoder have (intentionally) misaligned objectives. This leads to a non-cooperative game with a dynamic (non- classical) information structure, where one can adopt as a solution concept either the Nash or the Stackelberg equilibrium. The talk will introduce this class of problems, which have been of interest to multiple communities, including economics, information theory, communication, signal processing, and control, since the early 1980s, having picked up considerable steam very recently. As an overview of the topic, both old and new results will be presented, with one of the highlights (and perhaps a surprising element) being that there appears to be a major difference between the structures of the encoders and the decoders under Nash and Stackelberg equilibria, even when the channel is Gaussian and the (misaligned) distortion measures are quadratic. Several applications within the broader contexts of cyber-physical systems and decentralized stochastic control will conclude the presentation.

 

Tamer Başar has been with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1981, where he holds the academic positions of Swanlund Endowed Chair; Center for Advanced Study Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Professor, Coordinated Science Laboratory; Professor, Information Trust Institute; and Affiliate Professor, Mechanical Sciences and Engineering. He is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Study. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the European Academy of Sciences; Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM; a past president of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), the founding president of the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG), and a past president of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC). He has received several awards and recognitions over the years, including the highest awards of IEEE CSS, IFAC, AACC, and ISDG, the IEEE Control Systems Technical Field Award, and a number of international honorary doctorates and professorships. Dr. Başar has over 700 publications in systems, control, communications, optimization, and dynamic games, including books on non-cooperative dynamic game theory, robust control, network security, wireless and communication networks, and stochastic networks. He is editor of several book series.

 

Abstract: The recent years have shown substantial activities towards the analysis of dynamic social networks, which were opened up by rapid progresses in complex systems and networks. A closer examination of these systems has revealed some common principles regarding coordination and self-organization, including consensus protocols for distributed decision making. This discovery attracted the attention of many research communities to models of social groups evolution, which often exhibit rich and non-trivial dynamics, and sometime show persistent disagreement or other irregular behaviors.

 

The number of dynamic models which describe social group dynamics is currently growing. Their properties are not yet deeply investigated from the systems and control-theoretic viewpoint. In particular, some basic questions concerning identification, stability, convergence and resilience still remain unsolved. Furthermore, the usefulness of these models to describe the behavior of large groups in real social networks is still a widely open issue. This talk will address these questions, and also provide connections between dynamic models of social networks and centrality measures in complex networks.

 

Roberto Tempo is currently a Director of Research of Systems and Computer Engineering at the institute IEIIT, National Research Council (CNR), Politecnico di Torino, Italy. His research activities are mainly focused on the analysis and design of complex systems with uncertainty, and various related applications within information technology, which include the PageRank computation in the Google search engine, opinion dynamics in social networks and distributed localization of wireless sensor networks. On these topics, he has published more than 200 research papers in international journals, books and conferences. He is also a co-author of the book "Randomized Algorithms for Analysis and Control of Uncertain Systems,'' Springer-Verlag, London, published in two editions in 2005 and 2013.

 

Dr. Tempo is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC. He is a recipient of the "IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award", of the "Automatica Outstanding Paper Prize Award" and of the "Distinguished Member Award" from the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, Institute of Bologna, Italy, Class Engineering Sciences.

 

In 2010 Dr. Tempo was President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Automatica. He has been a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in 2011-2014 and Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence of the same journal in 2005-2009. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Systems & Control:  Foundations &Applications, Birkhauser. He was General Co-Chair for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, 2013 and Program Chair of the first joint IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference, Seville, Spain, 2005.

 

Abstract: In this talk, we introduce some of our recent results on distributed convex optimization of continuous-time multi-agent systems. Here we study some fundamental problems of distributed optimization with various constraints.   To study the problem, gradient-based algorithms are given to deal with the fundamental problems, and also extend our results to generalized cases including approximate gradients and the agents with nonlinear dynamics.

 

Yiguang Hong received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Peking University, Beijing, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing.  He is currently a Professor in the Institute of Systems Science, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CAS, and serves as the Director of Key Lab of Systems and Control, CAS and the Director of the Information Technology Division, National Center for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, CAS. His research interests include nonlinear dynamics and control, multi-agent systems, distributed optimization, social networks, and software reliability.  Prof. Hong serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Control Theory and Technology, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Acta Automatica Sinca, and also serves or served as Associate Editors for several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Journal, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, IEEE Ttransactions on Control of Network Systems, Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, and Kybernetika. He is a recipient of the Guang Zhaozhi Award at the Chinese Control Conference (in 1997), Young Author Prize of the IFAC World Congress (in 1999), Outstanding Young Scholar Fund of NSFC (in 2004), Young Scientist Award of CAS (in 2001), and the Youth Award for Science and Technology of China (in 2006), and the National Natural Science Prize of China (in 2008).

 

Abstract: This talk discusses synchronization of complex networks and consensus of multi-agent systems in a unified viewpoint. First, some special problems in synchronization of complex networks are presented. Disconnected synchronized regions and interesting changes of H2 norm of complex networks are discussed in detail. Disconnected synchronized regions show the possibility of intermittent synchronization and that sometimes the eigenratio cannot be a sychronizability index. Second, consensus of multi-agent systems is discussed. The consensus region can be proposed by borrowing the idea of synchronization of complex networks. Finite-time consensus of a class of second order multi-agent systems and event-triggered control problems are further presented. Finally, some relationships between synchronization of complex networks and consensus of multi-agent systems are discussed.

 

Zhisheng Duan received the B. S. and M. S. degrees in mathematics from Inner Mongolia Normal University and Inner Mongolia University, China, and the Ph.D. degree in control theory from Peking University, China in 1994, 1997 and 2000, respectively. From 2000 to 2002, he worked as a post-doctor in Peking University. Since 2002, he has joined the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University. He has been a full professor with Peking University since 2008. He visited America, Australia and Hong Kong several times to conduct collaborated research. So far, he has authored and co-authored two books and more than 100 journal papers. He served as an associate editor for IEEE transactions on Circuits and Systems-I from 2008 to 2009. Now, he is an editorial member of Control Theory and Applications in China, and an executive council member of Chinese Association of Automation. His research interests include robust control, stability of interconnected systems, flight control, analysis and control of complex dynamical networks, and consensus of multi-agent systems.

 

He obtained the 2001 Chinese Control Conference Guan-ZhaoZhi Award and the 2011 first class award in natural science from China Ministry of Education. He also obtained the outstanding youth research fund of Natural Science of Foundation of China in 2012, and the second class award of National Natural Science. He is currently a Cheung Kong Scholar chair professor of China Ministry of Education in Peking University.  

 

5.      Controlling the Internet of Things - from Energy Saving to Fast Evacuation in Smart Buildings

Abstract: There is an increasing interest in connecting things into network (known as the Internet of Things) to improve the performance and to provide novel services. Control has a big role here not just to help connecting things together, but also to make things “smarter”. In this talk, we will focus on a particular type of Internet of Things, namely the smart buildings. There is an increasing demand on energy efficiency, comfort, and safety in buildings. It is possible to achieve these different and sometimes conflicting objectives in the same time. Occupant-oriented wireless sensor network plays a key role, which collects information on the demand (what the occupant wants), the supply (what the building can offer), and how the two parts may coordinate with each other (the elasticity of the demand and the supply). We will briefly review the state of the art and the state of practice in this field. In particular, we will see how to control this Internet of Things to achieve energy saving and fast evacuation in smart buildings.

 

(Samuel) Qing-Shan Jia received the B.E. degree in automation in July 2002 and the Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering in July 2006, both from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is an Associate Professor in the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), Department of Automation, Tsinghua University. He was a postdoc at Harvard University in 2006, a visiting assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2010, and a visiting associate professor at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013. His research interest is to develop theory and methodology for design and optimization of large-scale complex systems through data-driven, statistical, and computational analysis with applications to energy systems, manufacturing systems, building systems, evacuation guidance systems, biological systems, cyber physical systems, and Internet of Things. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and Discrete Event Dynamic Systems – Theory and Applications. He was the Discrete Event Systems Technical Committee chair in IEEE Control Systems Society from 2012 to 2015. He now serves the Control for Smart Cities Technical Committee chair in IFAC, the Smart Buildings Technical Committee co-chair in IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and the Beijing Chapter Chair of IEEE Control Systems Society.

 

Abstract: Networked control systems, which arise in several important applications including remote robot control, automated navigation and sensor networks, have opened up huge opportunities to bring together ideas from both control/estimation and information theories to design engineering systems. By adapting ideas for quantifying network uncertainties from information theory, this talk studies the fundamental bottlenecks of feedback network on linear systems. Specifically, we explicitly delineate the minimum bit-rate for stabilizability, the maximum packet dropout rate for observability, and the network topology for synchronizability, all of which provide the possibility and impossibility of designing networked control systems.

 

Keyou You received the B.S. degree in Statistical Science from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, in 2007 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2012. From June 2011 to June 2012, he was with the Sensor Network Laboratory at NTU as a Research Fellow. Since July 2012, he has been with the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, China as an Assistant Professor. He held visiting positions at Politecnico di Torino, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Melbourne and etc.

 

His current research interests include networked control systems, parallel optimization, and their applications in oceanic technology. He received the Guan Zhaozhi best paper award at the 29th Chinese Control Conference in 2010, and a CSC-IBM China Faculty Award in 2014. He was selected to the national ``1000-Youth Talent Program" of China in 2014