Spring 2018

February 13, 2018 to February 14, 2018

Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems: A Retrospective and Two Recent Results on Security and Privacy

Speaker: Stephane Lafortune (University of Michigan)

Lafortune will begin with a brief retrospective of the theory of supervisory control of discrete event systems, initiated in the seminal work of Ramadge & Wonham over 30 years ago, and compare it with recent work in formal methods in...

February 20, 2018 to February 21, 2018

Submodular Optimization: From Discrete to Continuous and Back

Speaker: Amin Karbasi (Yale University)

Many procedures in statistics and artificial intelligence require solving non-convex problems. Historically, the focus has been to convexify the non-convex objectives. In recent years, however, there has been significant progress to optimize...

February 27, 2018 to February 28, 2018

Safe Learning in Robotics

Speaker: Claire Tomlin (University of California, Berkeley)

A great deal of research in recent years has focused on robot learning. In many applications, guarantees that specifications are satisfied throughout the learning process are paramount. For the safety specification, we present a controller...

March 13, 2018 to March 14, 2018

The Power of Multiple Samples in Generative Adversarial Networks

Speaker: Sewoong Oh (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

We bring the tools from Blackwell’s seminal result on comparing two stochastic experiments from 1953, to shine a new light on a modern application of great interest: Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Binary hypothesis testing is at the...

March 20, 2018 to March 21, 2018

Information Theoretic Interpretation of Deep Neural Networks

Speaker: Lizhong Zheng (MIT)

In this talk, we formulate a new problem called the "universal feature selection" problem, where we need to select from the high dimensional data a low dimensional feature that can be used to solve, not one, but a family of inference...

April 10, 2018 to April 11, 2018

Finding Online Extremists in Social Networks

Speaker: Tauhid Zaman (MIT)

Online extremists in social networks pose a new form of threat to the general public.  These extremists range from cyber bullies who harass innocent users to terrorist organizations such as ISIS that use social networks to spread propaganda...

April 18, 2018 to April 19, 2018

Community-Based and Peer-to-Peer Electricity Markets

Speaker: Pierre Pinson (Technical University of Denmark)

The deployment of distributed renewable generation capacities, new ICT capabilities, as well as a more proactive role of consumers, are all motivating rethinking electricity markets in a more distributed and consumer-centric fashion. After...

April 24, 2018 to April 25, 2018

Graph Signal Processing: Inferring Graphs from Data

Speaker: Jose M F Moura (Carnegie Mellon University)

Signals of interest nowadays go well beyond time and image (space) signals to include corporate, health, social data, to mention a few application domains. Graphs may be used to explain dependencies among data and uncovering them is a major...

May 2, 2018 to May 3, 2018

Security of Cyberphysical Systems

Speaker: P. R. Kumar (Texas A&M University)

The coming decades may see the large-scale deployment of networked cyber-physical systems to address global needs in areas such as energy, water, healthcare, and transportation. However, as recent events have shown, such systems are...

May 8, 2018 to May 9, 2018

A Rationally Designed Biomolecular Integral Feedback Control System for Robust Gene Regulation

Speaker: Mustafa Khammash (ETH Zurich)

Humans have been influencing the DNA of plants and animals for thousands of years through selective breeding. Yet it is only over the last 3 decades or so that we have gained the ability to manipulate the DNA itself and directly alter its...

May 15, 2018 to May 16, 2018

Distributed Algorithms: Tsitsiklis and Beyond

Speaker: Vivek Borkar (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)

This talk will recall Tsitsiklis' formulation of distributed algorithms with consensus and point out its generalizations in some directions, particularly an extension to distributed stochastic approximation with projection. This is joint...