Events Calendar

EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

Speaker: Edward A. Lee, Professor, University of California Berkeley

Talk Title: Resurrecting Laplace's Demon: The Case for Deterministic Models for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract: In 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace published an argument for determinism in the universe, arguing that if someone (a demon) were to know the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, then their past and future values for any given time are completely determined and can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics. This principle, of course, has been roundly invalidated by quantum mechanics, and yet the laws of classical mechanics continue to be extremely useful for prediction. In this talk, I will argue that models plays different (complementary) roles in engineering and science, and that deterministic models have historically proved proved even more valuable in engineering than in science.

Cyber-physical systems, which combine computation with physical dynamics, may seem on the surface to be a particularly poor match for deterministic models. I will argue that the next big advance in engineering methods must include deterministic models for CPS, and I will show that such models are both possible and practical.


Biography: Edward A. Lee is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at U.C. Berkeley. His research interests center on design, modeling, and analysis of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is the director of the nine-university TerraSwarm Research Center (http://terraswarm.org), a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, and the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy project. From 2005-2008, he served as chair of the EE Division and then chair of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He is co-author of nine books (counting second and third editions) and numerous papers. He has led the development of several influential open-source software packages, notably Ptolemy and its various spinoffs. He received the B.S. degree in Computer Science from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 1979, the S.M. degree in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in EECS from the University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, in 1986. From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.

Professor Lee's research group studies cyber-physical systems, which integrate physical dynamics with software and networks. Specifically, his group has made major contributions in models of computation with time and concurrency, model-based design and analysis, domain-specific languages, architectures for real-time computing, schedulability analysis, and modeling and programming of distributed real-time systems. His group has been involved with parallel and distributed computing, including models of computation with distributed real-time behaviors, partitioning and scheduling algorithms, backtracking techniques for fault tolerance and recovery, dataflow models of computation, and modeling of sensor networks. His group has made key contributions in semantics of timed and concurrent systems, including domain polymorphism, behavioral type systems, metamodeling of semantics, and comparative models of computation. His group has also worked on blending computing with continuous dynamics and hybrid systems. Prof. Lee himself has an extensive background in signal processing and physical-layer communication systems, and has co-authored five books on these subjects, in addition to four books on embedded systems technologies.


Host: Paul Bogdan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Estela Lopez