CISE Seminar: September 7, 2018, Julien Hendrickx – Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain

8 St. Mary’s Street, PHO 211
3:00pm-4:00pm
Refreshments at 2:45pm

Julien Hendrickx
Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain
Resident Scholar

Open Multi-Agent Systems: Arrivals and Departures

Even though scalability and robustness to agent losses are often cited as advantages of multi-agent systems, almost all theoretical results apply to system with fixed compositions. We consider open systems, that agents continuously leave and join during the process considered. We discuss the general challenges to analyze and design algorithms for such systems. Arrivals and departures keep indeed perturbing the system, forbidding any classical convergence. Moreover, correction mechanisms designed to cope with a small number of arrivals or departures may fail when these events keep taking place. We focus in particular on averaging, decentralized estimation, and computation of the maximum value among agents present in the system. We also present some fundamental performance limitations in open systems.

Julien Hendrickx is professor of mathematical engineering at Université catholique de Louvain, in the Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain since 2010, and the chair of the mathematical engineering department.

He obtained an engineering degree in applied mathematics (2004) and a PhD in mathematical engineering (2008) from the same university. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2003-2004, at the National ICT Australia in 2005 and 2006, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009 and 2010, holding postdoctoral fellowships of the F.R.S.-FNRS (Fund for Scientific Research) and of Belgian American Education Foundation.

Doctor Hendrickx is the recipient of the 2008 EECI award for the best PhD thesis in Europe in the field of Embedded and Networked Control, and of the Alcatel-Lucent-Bell 2009 award for a PhD thesis on original new concepts or application in the domain of information or communication technologies.

Faculty Host: Alexander Olshevsky
Student Host: Artin Spiridonoff