From rocket launches to insulin pumps, control systems appear whenever there is the need for improving the performance, or ensuring the normal functioning of systems. The ubiquity of systems that need automatic control made the development of theories necessary. For this reason, CSL was created in 1951 and named at first as Control Systems Laboratory. Even after the name change, CSL has never stopped doing groundbreaking research in the field of control (Ranked 1st worldwide). This success is the fruit of the collaborative and interdisciplinary environment of the Coordinate Science Laboratory.

The CSL Student Conference provides students from several universities opportunities to gather, discuss their works, and collaborate with the advancement of their fields. This present session has a keynote speech by Alexander Olshevsky, a prominent researcher in our area, and is followed by student talks. We invite you all to submit your works related (but not restricted) to control theory, optimization, decision, game theory, and hybrid systems.

Keynote Speaker – Alex Olshevsky, Center for Information and Systems Engineering & Division of Systems Engineering at Boston University

Control of Networks: Algorithms, Fundamental Limitations, Impossibility Results

Abstract:

We consider the problem of controlling and observing linear systems by affecting or measuring them in the fewest number of variables. We discuss the complexity of this problem, in particular giving polynomial-time algorithms for variable selection with order-optimal performance guarantees. We further discuss approximation algorithms and impossibility results, especially when constraints on energy expenditure are present.

Bio
Professor Alex Olshevsky received the B.S. degree in applied mathematics and the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, both in 2004, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, in 2006 and 2010, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA., Dr. Olshevsky is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Air Force Young Investigator Award, the INFORMS Computing Society Prize for the best paper on the interface of operations research and computer science, and a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Award for annual paper from the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization chosen to be reprinted in SIAM Review.

Student Speakers

			Yifan Hu, UofI Biased Stochastic Gradient Descent for Conditional Stochastic Optimization and its Applications in Meta-Learning (Technical Session Award)
			Invited Speaker – Raphael Chinchilla, UCSB Optimization based estimation of expected values with application to stochastic programming
			Heng-Sheng Chang, UofI An Energy Shaping Control Method for Manipulating a Cyber-Octopus Soft Arm
			Hussein Sibai, UofI Accelerating formal verification of autonomous multi-agent systems using symmetry transformations
			Joao Paulo Jansch-Porto, UofI Convergence Guarantees of Policy Optimization Methods for Markovian Jump Linear Systems
			Priyank Agrawal, UofI Bandits with Temporal Constraints

Contact

For additional details, feel free to contact the session chairs, Guilherme Scabin Vicinansa or Akshayaa Magesh.