Workshop Objective

The workshop is intended to meet several objectives. One of the objectives is to expose the participants to advances in the biological and social sciences in areas such as animal flocking behavior, swarming theory, multi-agent systems, and collective decision making. A second objective is to examine the contributions that distributed signal processing techniques can offer in these domains, and especially advances in the area of adaptive or cognitive networks. A third objective is to motive a cross-fertilization of ideas between signal processing researchers and other domains in the biological and social sciences, and in economic and public policy.

The workshop will help define a research agenda for the design of adaptive networks for distributed processing and will produce a report that can serve as a guide to the research community.

Motivation

The emerging interest in cognitive networks, smart grids, and self-organizing networks is motivating heightened research on distributed and collaborative signal processing strategies that enable networks to adapt and respond to information in real-time. It is therefore a timely occasion to organize a research workshop that will bring together research experts from various modalities to brainstorm on the challenges and opportunities that cognitive networks have to offer.

Cognitive networks consist of spatially distributed nodes that are linked together through a connection topology. The nodes are generally isotropic without any particular node taking a central control role. The nodes cooperate with each other through local interactions and adapt their states in response to both local data collected at the nodes and data received from their immediate neighbors. Information arriving at any particular node creates a ripple effect that propagates throughout the network by means of a diffusive process. The diffusion of information results in a form of collective intelligence as evidenced by improved adaptation, learning, tracking, and convergence behavior relative to non-cooperative networks. The edges linking the nodes can be assigned adjustable weights in accordance with the quality of the information that is exchanged over these edges. In this manner, cognitive networks are able to adjust their topologies as well. Distributed processing techniques over such adaptive networks contrast favorably with classical centralized fusion methods; central fusion approaches limit the autonomy of the network and add a critical point of failure due to the presence of a central node.

Interestingly, it has been observed in the social and biological sciences in studies on animal flocking behavior that while each individual agent in an animal colony is not capable of complex behavior, it is the combined coordination among multiple agents that leads to the manifestation of regular patterns of behavior and swarm intelligence. In a similar manner, cognitive networks should benefit from local cooperation among the nodes, and from a closer interaction between the physical and networking layers, in a manner that leads to enhanced performance in terms of improved learning, tracking, robustness, and convergence abilities.

Cognitive networks can be designed to perform a variety of tasks such as detection, estimation, or resource allocation tasks, through distributed processing. Examples of applications include environmental monitoring, distributed event detection, distributed resource monitoring, distributed estimation and target tracking, cooperation among cognitive radios searching for spectral resources, distributed processing and control over smart grids, contributions to swarm theory, animal flocking behavior theory, multi-agent systems, collective decision making, etc.

The workshop provides a forum for researchers to discuss the theory, algorithms, and challenges involved in the development of reliable cognitive networks. The workshop is expected to help define a research agenda for the design of adaptive networks for distributed processing and estimation, and will produce a report that can serve as a guide to the research community. The workshop recognizes the high potential for cross-fertilization of ideas among different fields involving signal processing, estimation and algorithms, adaptation, system theory, biological and social sciences, computer science, and economic and public policy.

Organizers

• John Cozzens, co-organizer, NSF Program Director

• Ali H. Sayed, co-organizer, Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA

• William Tranter, co-organizer, NSF Program Director

Participants (by invitation only)

Sergio Barbarossa, University of Rome, Italy

Eric Bonabeau, CEO, Icosystem, MA

Christophe Chamley, Professor of Economics, Boston University

Mark Coates, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, McGill University, Canada

John Cozzens, co-organizer, NSF Program Director

Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, UCLA

Deborah Gordon, Behavioral Ecologist, Stanford University

Vikram Krishnamurthy, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Canada

Martin Middendorf, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Germany

Kevin Passino, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ohio State University

Stephen Pratt, Professor of Life Sciences, Arizona State University

Vwani Roychodhury, Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA

Venkatesh Saligrama, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University

Ali H. Sayed, co-organizer, Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA

Ana Scaglionne, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC Davis

Mani Srivastava, Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA

Ahmed Tewfik, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota

William Tranter, co-organizer, NSF Program Director

Venu Veeravalli, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Martin Vetterli, EPFL, Swtizerland

Bernard Widrow, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Program

Venue

The workshop is taking place at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, which is located on 9876 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA. The hotel is about 2 miles from the UCLA campus and within walking distance to Century City and Rodeo Drive.

Contact

For assistance with the meeting logistics, please contact Lori Miller either by email or by phone at 1-310-267-1954.

Image Credits

Top row, left to right: (1) National Geographic photo by D. Doubilet; (2) National Geographic photo by M. Presti; (3) Photo from this link; (4) Photo from this link. Bottom row, left to right: (1) Photo from this link; (2) Christakis and Fowler, The New England Journal of Medicine, July 2007.