Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Hussein Sibai (UC Berkeley) - Towards Physics-aware Trustworthy Autonomy

Speaker: Hussein Sibai , UC Berkeley

Talk Title: Towards Physics-aware Trustworthy Autonomy

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Designing trustworthy autonomous systems is a looming challenge in several domains. Symbolic reasoning and verification can complement purely data-driven approaches by exploiting knowledge of structure and code, providing rigorous safety assurances, explaining why designs work, and helping find edge-cases quickly. In this talk, I will discuss recent results that use knowledge about physical laws, such as symmetries, to boost the scalability of formal verification of autonomous systems. The boosting benefits both data-driven and model-based analysis. My tool SceneChecker embodies these algorithms and data structures that use knowledge of symmetries to save verification algorithms from repeating expensive reachability computations. It implements a counterexample-guided abstraction-refinement (CEGAR) verification algorithm that compresses models by combining symmetric states. SceneChecker has been successful in verifying complex scenarios involving ground and aerial vehicles. In the second half, I will present results developed using notions from topological entropy to relate knowledge of physical laws governing a system with data requirements in solving estimation and verification problems. These results can give physics-aware lower-bounds that can guide future autonomy design processes.

This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

Biography: Hussein Sibai is a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley, advised by Murat Arcak and Sanjit Seshia. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in December 2021, advised by Sayan Mitra. He received his bachelor's degree in Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University of Beirut and a master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC. His research interests are in formal methods, control theory, and machine learning. Hussein has won the best poster award in HSCC 2018 and best paper nominations at HSCC 2017 and ATVA 2019. His work has been recognized by the Rambus fellowship, the Ernest A. Reid fellowship, the MAVIS Future Faculty fellowship, and the ACM SIGBED gold medal for the graduate category in the student research competition in CPS Week 21.

Host: Jyo Deshmukh

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

Audiences: By invitation only.

Contact: Assistant to CS chair