Dr. Jeff Shamma
Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems & Control
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
shamma@gatech.edu

Lecture Title: Feedback Control and Social Influence

One of the canonical motivations for “feedback control” is to obtain reliable behavior from unreliable components. Stated differently, the introduction of feedback can compensate (within limits, of course) for inaccurate modeling. While such reasoning is well established for engineering applications, it is equally relevant for problems of social influence, where a central planner seeks to influence the decisions or behaviors of a group of individuals, and the “unreliable components” are humans. In this talk, we discuss two settings for feedback control and social influence: (i) influencing the propagation of beliefs in a networked society and (ii) dynamic mechanism design. The talk presents some initial results in these directions and discusses challenges going forward associated with such non-traditional applications of feedback control perspectives.

Speaker Bio:

Jeff Shamma’s general research interest is feedback control and systems theory. His most recent area of interest is game theory and decision making for multiagent models in engineered and societal networked systems.

Jeff received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1983 and a PhD in Systems Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. He has held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; University of Texas, Austin; and University of California, Los Angeles; and visiting positions at Caltech and MIT. In 2007, Jeff returned to Georgia Tech where he is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems & Control.

Jeff is a recipient of the NSF Young Investigator Award (1992) and the American Automatic Control Council Donald P. Eckman Award (1996), and a Fellow of the IEEE (2006). He previously served on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (2008–2011) and is currently an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (2009–present) and Games (2012–present) and a senior editor for the IEEE Transactions on Control of Networked Systems (2013-present).