Control Theory for Biological and Cyberphysical Systems

Talk abstract: Control theory has historically been a tool for engineers, though in recent years it has found applications in biology as well. In this talk, I describe how biologically-relevant communication constraints can be incorporated into control theory, and what the resulting controllers can tell us about primate sensorimotor physiology and fruit fly locomotion. The incorporation of these constraints is not only beneficial for modeling biology, but can also yield novel control algorithms with improved efficiency, which will also be briefly discussed.

Bio: Jing Shuang (Lisa) Li received a Bachelors of Applied Science from the University of Toronto in 2018, and is currently a PhD candidate in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech. She is supported by graduate funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Her research focuses on distributed control theory with applications to engineering systems and biological models.