Distributed Control and Optimization for Networked Systems

Speaker: Prof. Bahman Gharesifard
Affiliation: Queen’s University

Abstract:

I will provide an overview of some recent advancements on control and optimization of large-scale networked systems, mathematically modelled as dynamical systems with external inputs over graphs. The talk will focus on fundamental limits to decentralization, as well as algorithms with guaranteed performance for stabilization, optimization, and learning tasks. I provide a broad range of problems of interests, but particularly show graph-theoretic conditions that decentralization imposes on stabilization of sparse systems, and provide procedures to overcome some of these limitations using periodic inputs. On the optimization side, after giving an overview of some recent developments on distributed optimization, I introduce algorithms with guaranteed performance on sequences of time-varying random graphs. One key objective throughout the talk is to showcase the extensive applications, as well as the versatile set of mathematical tools that naturally enter the study of networked systems.

Biography:

Bahman Gharesifard is an Associate Professor with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen’s University, and currently an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow at the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control, University of Stuttgart. He held postdoctoral positions with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University of California, San Diego 2009-2012 and with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2012-2013. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Queen’s University in 2009. He received the 2019 CAIMS-PIMS Early Career Award, jointly awarded by the Canadian Applied and Industrial Math Society and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2019, and an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement in 2019. He was a finalist, as an advisor, for the Best Student Paper Award at the American Control Conference in 2017. He received the Engineering and Applied Science First Year Instructor Teaching Award in 2015 and 2017, and was shortlisted for a Frank Knox Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014. He serves on the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and as an Associate editor for the IEEE Control System Letters. His research interests include systems and controls, distributed control, distributed optimization and learning, geometric control theory, social and economic networks, game theory, geometric mechanics, and applied Riemannian geometry.

For more information, contact Prof. Paulo Tabuada (tabuada@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Jan 23, 2020
11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095