Friday, April 11, 2025 - 11:30am
Event Calendar Category
Other LIDS Events
Speaker Name
S. Shankar Sastry
Affiliation
University of California Berkeley
Building and Room number
Grier Room B, 34-401B
Building and Room Number
Grier B
"Learning Enabled Multi-Agent Systems in Societal Systems Transformation"
Opportunities abound for the transformation of societal systems being enabled by AI/ML and new business models in diverse sectors such as energy, transportation, health care, manufacturing and financial systems. The transformation of societal systems is accompanied by issues of economic models, privacy, security and fairness considerations. Indeed, the area of “mechanism design” for societal scale systems is a key feature in transitioning the newest technologies and providing new services. Crucially, human beings interact with automation and change their behavior in response to incentives offered to them. Training, Learning and Adaptation in Human AI Teams is one of the most engaging problems in Human-AI systems today. In this talk, I will present a few vignettes: how to align societal objectives with Nash equilibria using suitable incentive design, proofs of stability of decentralized decision making while learning preferences and a new take on Multi-Agent RL methods. The application of the techniques to problems in road transportation, Advanced Air Traffic Management will be presented. Additionally, we have recently been applying these methods to fields of robotics and embodied intelligence such as in robotic Indy car racing and ping pong. These applications will also be presented. The work is joint with Chinmay Maheshwari, Manxi Wu, Kshitij Kulkarni, Pan Yang Su, and Dvij Kalaria.
S. Shankar Sastry is currently the Thomas Siebel Professor of Computer Science,. He was till 2022 also the director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, a Center spanning the ten campuses of the University of California, dedicated to the use of technology and innovative business models to lift people out of poverty. He is also the co-Director of the C3 Digital Transformation Institute (C3DTI), a data sciences institute spanning Berkeley, UIUC, CMU, Chicago, MIT, Princeton, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and Stanford. C3DTI is an institute aimed to develop the science and technology of digital transformation in societal systems such as in health care, energy systems, transportation systems. Additional he has helped launch a new FHL Vive Center for Enhanced Reality for exploring the boundaries between augmented reality and real scenes with applications to autonomy, performance arts, and education.. He has faculty appointments in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Bioengineering and Mechanical Engineering. From 2007-2018 he was the Dean and Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering. From 2004 to 2007 he was the Director of CITRIS (Center for Information Technology in the Interests of Society) an interdisciplinary center spanning UC Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz. He has served as Chairman, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley from January, 2001 through June 2004. From 1999-2001, he was the Director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, VA. Dr. Sastry received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was on the faculty of MIT as Asst. Professor from 1980-82 and Harvard University as a Gordon Mc Kay professor in 1994. His areas of personal research are AI and Machine Learning, resilient cyber physical systems, mechanism design and incentive theory for the digital transformation system of complex societal scale systems networks, cybersecurity, autonomous robotic vehicles and robots, computer vision, nonlinear and adaptive control, control of hybrid and embedded systems. He is also deeply committed to the use of technology to lift people out of poverty as testified by his work with USAID, PhilDev, and other international foundations through his directorship of the Blum Center for Developing Ecnomies. From 2006-2017 he led a ten year NSF Science and Technology Center (with multi-university partners), TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies) and its successor five year center 2013-19, FORCES (Foundations of Resilient Cyber Physical Systems).