Events for the 4th week of September
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Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Mon, Sep 17, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Soon-Jo Chung, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Multi-agent cooperative control and estimation for flying cars and spacecraft swarms
Abstract: Recent advances in self-driving car and drone technologies are turning a century-old dream of vertical-take-off-landing personal transportation vehicles into a reality with many existing projects in development. Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST)'s engineers and scientists have developed a 1/5 working scale model of their Autonomously Flying Ambulance (AFA) with innovative design ideas, including flight by a hybrid of distributed fans and deployable wings, bio-inspired flight and control, and vision-based navigation. The model has been flight-tested successfully in CAST's unique drone arena using an open-air distributed fan-array wind tunnel. CAST's AFA rotorcraft and autonomy technologies can provide solutions for a range of short-distance travel challenges: point-to-point delivery of packages on Earth or scientific samples on Mars. I will review some of the control theoretical results derived for control and coordination of novel aerial robotic platforms. First, I will present distributed, motion planning and multi-point routing algorithms for optimally reconfiguring swarms of vehicles with limited communication and computation capabilities from various pick-up locations to target locations. The real-time guidance algorithm solves both the optimal assignment and collision-free trajectory generation in an integrated manner. Three related approaches have been derived for optimal assignment problem for real-time routing: (1) distributed auction assignment, (2) novel probabilistic swarm guidance that employs time-inhomogeneous Markov chains; and (3) potential games solved by binary log-linear learning. Second, nonlinear tracking control and estimation is utilized to track optimal reconfiguration trajectories with a property of robustness (finite-gain Lp incremental stability). I will also show such nonlinear incremental stability analysis can be extended to a set of Ito stochastic nonlinear systems for synchronization control and nonlinear estimation, including exponential stability of a distributed Bayesian filtering algorithm, robust nonlinear estimation for visual SLAM, and consensus stability of distributed reinforcement learning for flying ambulances or taxis.
Biography: Prof. Soon-Jo Chung received the S.M. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Sc.D. degree in Estimation and Control with a minor in Optics from MIT in 2002 and 2007, respectively. He received the B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering from KAIST in 1998 (school class rank 1 out of 120). He is currently Associate Professor of Aerospace and Bren Scholar in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Prof. Chung is also a Research Scientist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For August 2009-August 2016, Prof. Chung was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research areas include nonlinear control and estimation theory and optimal/robust flight controls with application to aerial robotics, distributed spacecraft systems, and computer vision-based navigation. He is the recipient of the UIUC Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, the Beckman Faculty Fellowship of the U of Illinois Center for Advanced Study, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and three best conference paper awards (2015 AIAA GNC, 2009 AIAA Infotech, 2008 IEEE EIT). Prof. Chung is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic
More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/chung.html
More Information: 18.09.18_Soon-Jo Chung_CSC@USC Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/chung.html
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Multi-Mode Systems: LEGO-style Development for Cyber-Physical Systems
Wed, Sep 19, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ashutosh Trivedi, University of Colorado Boulder
Talk Title: Multi-Mode Systems : LEGO-style Development for Cyber-Physical Systems
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: The recent "internet-of-things" (IoT) revolution has led to a profusion of miniaturized and cost-effective components such as microprocessors, wireless communication devices, sensors, and actuators. This has enabled the "LEGO style" design of complex cyber- physical systems. These systems integrate rich continuous dynamics, discrete switching, stochastic behaviors, and the presence of multiple rational agents. Thus the twin problems of reliable and secure design becomes extremely challenging. This necessitates a disciplined approach that guarantees correctness by construction.
In this talk, we will present multi-mode systems a mathematical formalism that captures fundamentals of building complex behaviors from simpler predefined primitives. Multi-mode systems naturally capture discrete switching, continuous dynamics, worst-case, and stochastic disturbances in a simple mathematical framework. We present fundamental results on computation and control of such systems with relevance to diverse areas such as robotic path planning, hierarchical and discrete-event control, and game theory.
Biography: Ashutosh Trivedi is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Warwick. Prior to joining the University of Colorado Boulder, Ashutosh worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oxford. Ashutosh's research interests lies at the intersection of computer science and control theory. His research focuses on applying rigorous mathematical reasoning techniques for the design and analysis of safe and secure cyber -physical systems.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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CENG Seminar
Thu, Sep 20, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhiyun Qian, University of California Riverside
Talk Title: Network Side Channel Attacks: An Oversight Yesterday, A Lingering Threat Today
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the history of attacks against one of the most widely used protocol --- TCP. As side channels were never really considered a threat when network protocols are designed, they suffer almost an endless stream of problems. I will demonstrate a blind off-path attacker can use side channels to hijack a remote TCP connection. Recently, we show two serious attacks: (1) a completely blind off-path attacker (not MITM) can hijack a TCP connection between any two arbitrary hosts (i.e., inferring the existence of connection, and sequence numbers). (2) a variation of the attack which exploits a fundamental design of Wi-Fi which is unfortunately impossible to patch in the short term. I will also give insights on how to systematically discover such problems
Biography: Dr. Zhiyun Qian is an associate professor at University of California, Riverside. His research interest is on system and network security, including vulnerability discovery, system building, applied program analysis, Internet security (e.g., TCP/IP), Android security, side channels. He has published more than a dozen papers at the top security conferences including IEEE Security & Privacy, ACM CCS, USENIX Security, and NDSS. His projects have resulted in real-world impact with security patches applied in Linux kernel, Android, macOS, and firewall products. His work on TCP side channel attacks won the most creative idea award at GeekPwn 2016 and winner award at GeekPwn 2017. His research is supported by 8 NSF grants (including the NSF CAREER Award) and two industrial gifts.
Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
More Information: 18.09.20 Zhiyun Qian Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore