CANCELED: Control Engineering for Equity in Social Systems

ABSTRACT: Addressing the causes and finding solutions to the unequal distribution of societal resources requires a multidisciplinary effort in cooperation with the communities involved. With the recent advances in sensing and actuation technologies in social systems, there is a need to develop a framework for data-driven robust control that can predict social processes and quantify the impact of actions aimed at improving diversity, equity, and inclusion. This talk will present control theory and engineering strategies in social systems to empower people and improve their well-being. My work expands multimedia processing, stability theory, and controllability analysis of social systems. It also contributes to basic and applied behavioral and social science via interdisciplinary collaborations in diverse domains such as poverty, mental health, and inclusive education.

BIO: Hugo G. Villasanti is a postdoctoral scholar in the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at The Ohio State University. He received his B.Sc. in Electromechanical Engineering from the National University of Asuncion, Paraguay. After three years in mechanical assembly projects for large-scale industrial plants, he received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2015 and 2019, respectively. His graduate work focused on control theory and engineering for financial and mental health equity. He served in local and international humanitarian engineering projects as a member of the IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee. As a postdoctoral scholar, he is developing human-centered technology to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in early childhood education. He has been a recipient of the Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School at The Ohio State University.

***Event will take place via Zoom. Zoom link and password will be distributed to the Controls Group e-mail list-serv. To join this list-serv, please send an (empty) email message to [email protected] with the word “subscribe” in the subject line. Zoom information is also available upon request to Katherine Godwin ([email protected]).