Doctoral seminars

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Wednesday, May 21th 2008, 11:00-12:00 AM in Celestijnenlaan 200A room 05.001, 3001 Leuven-Heverlee

Computation and Control: New Methods and New Possibilities

By Matthew Peet (INRIA Rocquencourt)

The study of the control systems is one of the oldest disciplines in engineering, yet recently there has been a substantial change in the way it is practiced. Powerful computers and efficient algorithms for optimization have replaced graphs and tables as the tools of the practicing control engineer. In fact, most problems that control engineers are currently working on are complex enough that devising a reliable controller would be a practical impossibility without computational aids.

In this talk, we give examples of the new types of complex systems which control engineers have begun to investigate in recent years. These examples come from Internet congestion control and cancer therapy and include features such as nonlinearity, delay, and decentralized structure. To address these systems, we adopt ideas from computer science and optimization and combine them with control theory using results from mathematical analysis. The results are used to design numerical algorithms which are then applied to real problems in Internet congestion control and cancer therapy.

Biography
Matthew Peet received the B.S. in Physics and in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999 and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2001 and 2006. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) near Paris, France. His research interests include computational methods of analysis and control of nonlinear and distributed systems. He works extensively on polynomial optimization algorithms including the sum-of- squares methodology