Some Non Traditional Applications of Control Theory (or why should I attend a control talk if I'm not a systems person?)
From FazelWiki
Abstract:
During the past decades systems theory has achieved a high degree of maturity, leading to powerful tools that have allowed for solving difficult practical problems. Central to the success of this effort is a viewpoint that emphasizes both robustness and complexity issues, seeking for computationally tractable solutions, or in cases where the underlying problem is intrinsically hard, for tractable relaxation with suboptimality certificates. In this talk we will argue that these techniques have a large potential that extends much further than the traditional domain of systems theory. In particular we will illustrate these ideas by using a control motivated approach to look at problems arising in the context of:
1. Classical physics: Appearance of dissipation in Hamiltonian dynamics,
2. Computer Vision: Robust tracking, appearance modeling, motion segmentation, video-shot segmentation,
3. Image Processing: Static and dynamic texture modeling and recognition, video inpainting.
As it will be discussed in the talk, in all of these cases, the underlying problem can be reduced to establishing the existence of a dynamic operator that satisfies suitable interpolation conditions. In turn, this problem can be reduced to a convex optimization and efficiently solved. The talk will finish by discussing some open problems and general challenges to the dynamic systems community.
Biography:
Mario Sznaier received the Ingeniero Electronico and Ingeniero en Sistemas de Computacion degrees from the Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay and the MSEE and Ph.D degrees from the University of Washington. He has held faculty positions at the University of Central Florida (1991-1993) and the Pennsylvania State University (1993-2006), and visiting appointments at the California Institute of Technology in 1990 and 2000. In 2006 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University as the Dennis Picard Chaired Professor. His research interests include Multiobjective and Risk-Adjusted Robust Control, Dynamic Vision, Robust Identification, Robust Model (In)Validation, and Applications of Dynamical Systems Theory to Physics. A list of publications, active research projects and demos can be found at: http://robustsystems.ece.neu.edu. Dr. Sznaier is currently serving as an associate editor for the journal Automatica, Executive Director of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and member of its Board of Governors. He is also the Program Vice-chair for the 2008 IEEE CDC and the Program Chair for the 2009 IFAC ROCOND.
