Title: When to exercise control? Abstract: Recent interest in Cyber-Physical Systems in bringing to light new problems at the intersection of computation, communication, and control. The most recent research on communication and control has focused on determining which information to transmit and how to transmit it when such information is to be used for control purposes. In this talk I will discuss a different problem at the intersection of communication, control and computation: when to transmit information? Control loops have been traditionally treated as periodic for purposes of real-time computing and communication. This periodicity assumption results in a separation of concerns that has been very successful over the years: control engineers can safely ignore implementation details when designing feedback controllers; and software/communication engineers can safely ignore stability and other control considerations when designing real-time schedules and communication protocols. However, the periodicity assumption also leads to conservative designs that are inadequate when computation and communication resources are limited. In this talk I will propose event-triggered and self-triggered control policies that have guaranteed performance under much weaker computation and communication requirements. Biography: Paulo Tabuada was born in Lisbon, Portugal, one year after the Carnation Revolution. He received his "Licenciatura" degree in Aerospace Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal in 1998 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002 from the Institute for Systems and Robotics, a private research institute associated with Instituto Superior Tecnico. Between January 2002 and July 2003 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. After spending three years at the University of Notre Dame, as an Assistant Professor, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he established and directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory. Paulo Tabuada's contributions to cyber-physical systems have been recognized by multiple awards including the NSF CAREER award in 2005, the Donald P. Eckman award in 2009 and the George S. Axelby award in 2011. In 2009 he co-chaired the International Conference Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC'09) and he is the program co-chair for the 3rd IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems. He currently serves as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and his latest book, on verification and control of hybrid systems, was published by Springer in 2009.
