Information Extraction and Decision Making in Dynamic Environments: A Hybrid Systems Approach

An outstanding challenge in the design of large scale, distributed
sensing, actuation and control systems is the computational complexity
arising from complex interactions between different system components
as well as interactions with the dynamic environment the system
operates in. How can we extract actionable information sparsely
encoded in sensory data streams and detect interesting events? How can
we build robust cyber-physical systems that can autonomously react to
these events and perform complex tasks in dynamic environments?

In the first part of the talk, I will introduce robust hybrid system
identification schemes and illustrate how changes in the invariants of
identified models can be used in event detection and information
extraction from noisy sensory data. While in principle this approach
leads to generically nonconvex, hard to solve problems, as we show,
computationally tractable relaxations (and in some cases exact
solutions) can be obtained. The second part of the talk focuses on
design of correct-by-construction controllers for cyber-physical
systems. I will present a general framework, which combines ideas from
control theory and computer science, to synthesize hierarchical
controllers from high level behavioral specifications. Then I will
present a result on distributed synthesis that exploits the underlying
network structure to reduce the computational complexity and to
increase design modularity. I will describe applications of these ideas to a diverse set of problems ranging from video analytics and distributed surveillance to vehicle management systems.

Necmiye Ozay received the B.S. degree from Bogazici University, Istanbul in 2004, the M.S. degree from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree from Northeastern University, Boston in 2010, all in electrical engineering. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, between 2010 and 2013. She is currently an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests lie at the broad interface of dynamical systems, control, optimization and formal methods with applications in cyber-physical system design, system identification, verification & validation, autonomy and vision.