[Colloquium] Guest Speaker Announcement

[Ponda Barnes]

Guest Speaker
 
Presented by: Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
 
Speaker:  Ali Jadbabaie
Speaker's homepage: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~jadbabai/
 
Date: Thursday, May 03, 2007
Time: 3:00
Location: TTI-C Conference room
 
 
 
 
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.
 
If you have any questions or would like to meet the speaker, please contact
Ponda Barnes at pondabarnes at tti-c.org
For future TTI-C talks and events, please go to
http://ttic.uchicago.edu/cal/month.php
 
 
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