Dear All,

Hope all is well!
We updated the seminar time for this Friday's seminar, speaker: Dr. Xuan Wang. It will take place at 11:00 am, instead of the previously announced time. Below please find the updated seminar announcement.

Thank you,
Jammie



ECE Department Seminar



Distributed Control and Optimization in

Autonomous Multi-agent Systems



Xuan Wang

Post-doctoral Researcher

UC-San Diego



Friday, March 5, 2021

11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Zoom Meeting Link:

https://gmu.zoom.us/j/99579271845



Abstract: Connected autonomous systems are usually composed of multiple interacting subsystems (agents). Such interaction among agents, on one hand, offers a wider range of operational capability, better intelligence, and a higher-degree of autonomy than single monolithic systems; on the other hand, it also introduces network constraints to the communications among agents, which makes such systems more challenging to control.



My research aims to enable the autonomy of connected multi-agent systems by addressing two key challenges caused by the network nature of the system, namely, scalability and reliability. In this talk, two majors directions will be introduced. The first part focuses on designing scalable, fast converging algorithms for distributed computation and optimization, which can be applied to multi-agent systems for resource allocation, information fusion, cooperative learning and data-driven control. The second part studies the resilience of multi-agent systems in the presence of sophisticated cyber-attacks. I will introduce a new approach that automatically isolates the information from malicious agents. The process does not involve any identification and is purely based on agents’ local information. At last, I will also briefly introduce my post-doc research, the data-driven control of nonlinear neural network systems.



Bio: Xuan Wang is a post-doctoral researcher with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. degree in autonomy and control, from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University in 2020. Before coming to the US, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in automation in 2014, and his master’s degree in Control Science and Engineering in 2016, from Harbin Institute of Technology, China.



Xuan has played the leading role in several projects funded by Northrop Grumman Corp., AFRL and CRISP, covering the areas of autonomy and resilience in networked multi-agent systems; resources/task allocation in multi-robot swarms; and the data-driven control of neuron network systems. He is the receiver of the Koerner Scholarship and Bilsland Fellowship, Purdue University. He also serves as the reviewer for a number of journals, including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Control of Network Systems, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Automatica.