[Colloquium] FW: flocking and emergence (of common features) announcement. TTI-C chicago April 24-26 and May 3

[Stephen Smale]

>From Steve Smale.

There will be a mini-conference on the subject of flocking and emergent
features at tti-c Chicago, address below, univ of Chicago press building.
Four talks are listed below.


Andrea Bertozzi
University of California, Los Angeles
TTI-C April 24 Tuesday at 2:00

Swarming by Nature and by Design

See TTI-C events for abstract.

Felipe Cucker
City Univ of Hong Kong
TTI-C April 25 Wed. at 3:00

"Flocking in noisy environments"

Abstract: We modify the model introduced in [Cucker & Smale; Emergent
behavior in flocks] to allow for noise. The main results gives bounds both
on the time and on the probability with which convergence to
nearly-alignment (a situation in which the dispersion of the velocities of
the flock is small) is reached. These results are both for continuous and
discrete time.

Jackie Shen
Univ of Minnesota
TTI-C April 26 Thurs at 3:00

Title: Cucker-Smale Hierarchical Flocking and Continuum Swarming

Abstract:
  We explore the emergent behaviors of a Cucker-Smale flock under
  hierarchical leadership, as well as in the continuum limit when
  flocking condenses to swarming. It is shown that the long-range
  social interactions (or forces) in the Cucker-Smale model often
  lead to robust convergence and stability, which are vital for
  maintaining the order within a biological or robotic aggregration.

Ali Jadbabaie
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering University of Pennsylvania
TTI-C May 3, Thurs at 3:00
Title: Distributed Coordination: From Flocking and synchronization to
coverage in sensor networks:

ABSTRACT

In this talk we provide a unified view of several distributed coordination
and consensus algorithms which have appeared in various disciplines such as
distributed systems, statistical physics, biology, computer graphics,
robotics, and control theory over the past 2 decades. These algorithms have
been proposed as a mechanism for demonstrating emergence of a global
collective behavior (such as social aggregation in animals, schooling,
flocking and synchronization in oscillator networks) using purely local
interactions. Utilizing tools from spectral graph theory and control and
dynamical systems theory, we provide an analysis of these algorithms. Using
tools from algebraic topology, we extend our results from graphs to
simplicial complexes to verify coverage in mobile sensor networks in a
decentralized fashion. These simplicial complexes are induced by the local
connectivity of agents in a network, and their homology groups  allow us to
infer the coverage properties of mobile sensort networks with time-varying
interconnections. The enabling mathematical technique for our result is the
theory of higher order Laplacian operators, which will be presented as a
generalization of the graph Laplacian used in the first part of the talk for
analysis of  synchronization, agreement and consensus problems. 



Steve Smale


Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
1427 East 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
773-834 2510, or 773-834 2500
fax 773-834 2557. home phone is 773-324-2684.
also univ of chicago, math, computer science, depts.  emeritus in the univ
of cal, berkeley, math and economics depts.
NEW MINERAL COFFEE TABLE BOOK;
http://www.lithographie.org/bookshop/the_smale_collection.htm