Dr. Daniel Rivera
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Program Director
Control Systems Engineering Laboratory
School for Engineering of Matter, Transport, and Energy
Arizona State University
daniel.rivera@asu.edu
Lecture Title: Optimized behavioral interventions: what does control systems engineering have to offer?
The last decade has witnessed an increasing interest in applying systems science concepts for problems in behavioral health, and using these to inform the design, analysis, and implementation of optimized interventions. How can control systems engineering and system identification impact interventions for chronic, relapsing disorders such as drug abuse, cigarette smoking and obesity? The presentation addresses this question by focusing on the problem of time-varying “adaptive” interventions. In an adaptive intervention, dosages of intervention components are assigned based on the assessed values of tailoring variables that reflect some important outcome measure (e.g., number of cigarettes smoked, parental function) or adherence (e.g, days abstinent). Because time-varying adaptive interventions constitute closed-loop dynamical systems, they are correspondingly amenable to control engineering solutions. System identification is enabled by intensive longitudinal data (ILD) that can be obtained in the field via ecological momentary assessment (EMA); this creates the availability of rapidly sampled measurements from which dynamical system behavior can be discerned and modeled. How control principles can be applied in this broad setting is demonstrated with a number of illustrative problems: dynamic modeling and hybrid model predictive control of low-dose naltrexone as treatment for fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition; modeling of a smoking cessation intervention involving bupropion and counseling, and constructing a dynamic model and closed-loop control of an intervention for preventing excessive weight gain during pregnancy.
Speaker Bio:
Daniel E. Rivera became part of the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University in the fall of 1990. Prior to joining ASU he was an Associate Research Engineer in the Control Systems Section of Shell Development Company. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1987, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, respectively. He has been a visiting researcher with the Division of Automatic Control at Linköping University, Sweden, Honeywell Technology Center, the University “St. Cyril and Methodius” in Skopje, Macedonia, the National Distance Learning University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain, and the University of Almería in Andalucía, Spain.
His research interests include the topics of robust process control, system identification, and the application of control engineering principles to problems in process systems, supply chain management, and prevention and treatment interventions in behavioral health. Dr. Rivera was chosen as 1994-1995 Outstanding Undergraduate Educator by the ASU student chapter of AIChE, and was a recipient of 1997-1998 Teaching Excellence Award awarded by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at ASU. In 2007, Dr. Rivera was awarded a K25 Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health to study control systems approaches for fighting drug abuse.