Christos Cassandras
Christos G. Cassandras is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received degrees from Yale University (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982). In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 350 refereed papers in these areas, and five books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. He has most recently collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents ® . Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He was the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS). He has also served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS, as well as on several IEEE committees, and has chaired several conferences. He has been a plenary/keynote speaker at numerous international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002, and has also been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.
He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize and a 2014 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition (for a “Smart Parking” system and for the analytical engine of the Street Bump system respectively), the 2014 Engineering Distinguished Scholar Award at Boston University, several honorary professorships, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC.
John S. Baras, Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering
B.S. in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1970; M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University 1971, 1973. Since 1973 with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Applied Mathematics Faculty, at the University of Maryland College Park. Since 2000 faculty member in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. Since 2014 faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Founding Director of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) from 1985 to 1991. Since 1991, Founding Director of the Maryland Center for Hybrid Networks (HYNET). Since 2013, Guest Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. Life Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the SIAM, Fellow of the AAAS and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Received the 1980 George Axelby Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the 2006 Leonard Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, the 2014 Tage Erlander Guest Professorship from the Swedish Research Council, and a three year (2014-2017) Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Professor Baras’ research interests include automatic control, communication and computing systems and networks, and model-based systems engineering.
Email: baras@umd.edu Web page: http://www.isr.umd.edu/~baras/
Invited talk: Event-Based Distributed Collaborative Control and the Value of Information
We consider distributed collaborative decision making and control from the perspectives of “value of information” and “actionable information”. We first establish that having more communications and more data exchanged is not always beneficial in such multi-agent problems. We then provide examples from collaborative sensor fusion and tracking, and collaborative control, where these novel concepts coupled with a need for efficiency, result in event-based strategies being “best”. We discuss the reasons why such strategies are superior to continuous or uniformly sampled exchanges of data or signaling. We link these results to various metrics including efficiency, complexity, delay and robustness. A key method is tradeoff analysis of the cost of communication vs the value of information and the performance of distributed collaborative decision making. We close with some new foundational problems that emerge.