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University Calendar
Events for February
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PhD Defense - Eric Shieh
Mon, Feb 02, 2015 @ 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Dissertation Title
Not a Lone Ranger: Unleashing Defender Teamwork in Security Games
PhD Candidate
Eric Shieh
Committee
Milind Tambe (chair), Morteza Dehghani, Cyrus Shahabi, Andrea Armani, Rahul Jain
Time and Place
Monday, 2 Feb, 1:30pm
EEB 248 Conference Room
Abstract
Given the global concerns about security, intelligent allocation of limited security resources has become a major challenge. Game theory offers a promising solution; in particular, Stackelberg Security Games (SSGs) have been used in modeling these types of problems via a defender and an attacker(s), and applications based on SSGs have been widely deployed in the United States and tested in countries around the world. Despite recent successful real-world deployments of SSGs, scale-up to handle defender teamwork remains a fundamental challenge in this field. The latest techniques do not scale-up to domains where multiple defenders must coordinate time-dependent joint activities; the number of pure strategies becomes too large for the game to be even represented in memory. To address this challenge, my thesis presents algorithms for solving defender teamwork in SSGs in two phases. As a first step, I focus on domains without execution uncertainty, in modeling and solving SSGs that incorporate teamwork using incremental strategy generation, where defender pure strategies are generated one at a time. To efficiently generate strategies incrementally, I provide several novel techniques including: (i) an approach that uses an ordered network of nodes (determined by solving the traveling salesman problem) to generate individual defender strategies; (ii) exploitation of iterative reward shaping of multiple coordinating defender units to generate coordinated strategies.
In the second stage of my thesis, I address execution uncertainty among defender resources that arises from the real world by integrating the powerful teamwork mechanisms offered by decentralized Markov Decision Problems (Dec-MDPs) into security games. My thesis offers the following novel contributions: (i) New models of security games where a defender team's pure strategy is defined as a Dec-MDP policy for addressing coordination under uncertainty; (ii) New algorithms and heuristics that solve this new model and help scale up in the number of targets and agents to handle real-world scenarios; (iii) Exploration of the robustness of randomized pure strategies. Different mechanisms, from both solving situations with and without execution uncertainty, may be used depending on the features of the domain. This thesis opens the door to a powerful combination of previous work in multiagent systems on teamwork and security games.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Fluor Information Session
Wed, Feb 04, 2015 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Join AIChE to learn more about Fluor, one of the world's largest engineering project management companies. Four employees will be here to recruit YOU. Hear about their experiences and get your questions answered first hand. Bring your resume!
RSVP HERE
VIEW FACEBOOK EVENTLocation: TBA
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC American Institute of Chemical Engineers
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From Systems to Networks: Theory and Computation for Distributed Predictive Control
Tue, Feb 17, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University Calendar
Abstract: The control of a network of interacting dynamical systems is a central challenge for addressing a range of emerging application problems; examples include energy systems balancing a network of generation, load and storage devices, or robotic systems comprising a large number of components or agents. Utilizing the connectivity and interactions in the network by exploiting advances in communication and computation technologies offers the potential for pushing these systems to higher performance while increasing efficiency of operation, which will reduce system over-design and associated costs. However, safety requirements and high system complexity represent key limiting factors for leveraging these new opportunities.
This talk will present some of our recent work that brings high-performance control with hard guarantees on system safety to distributed systems, offering a scalable and modular approach that exploits interconnection effects and flexibly adjusts to network changes. A new framework for plug and play distributed predictive control will be introduced and we will discuss essential theoretical and practical aspects for certifying distributed decision-making based on an optimization-in-the-loop paradigm. We will show how the proposed scheme ensures the fundamental properties of stability and constraint satisfaction of the global system without recourse to any centralized coordination and even in the presence of online network changes, while allowing the control systems to optimize for performance. Application examples in area generation control and grid-aware electric vehicle charging will demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed theory. Lastly, we will address the computational aspects of the framework and present new results for certifying optimization with limited-precision computation or communication.
Biography: Melanie Zeilinger is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Marie Curie fellow in a joint program with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley and the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. From 2011-2012 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ãcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. She received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 2011, and the diploma in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany in 2006. She conducted her diploma thesis research at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2005-2006. She received the ETH medal for her dissertation in 2012 and was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship for Career Development by the European Commission in 2011. Her research interests are centered around real-time and distributed control and optimization, as well as safe learning-based control, with applications to energy distribution and management systems and human-in-the-loop control.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 540, x04667
Location: EEB 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kaela Berry
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USC Viterbi STEM Spotlight on the Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Tue, Feb 24, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 05:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering K-12 STEM Center
University Calendar
The USC Viterbi STEM Spotlight series focuses on three departments each year. In February, the Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering is being spotlighted. In the afternoon of Tuesday, 2/24, pre-registered middle & high school students will be visiting the research labs of Professors Childress, Sioutas, Masri, and Lynett. More information on the USC Viterbi STEM Spotlight can be found here: http://bit.ly/CEEspotlight.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) -
Audiences: K-12 Schools pre-registered
Contact: Katie Mills
