CISE Seminar: Robert Shorten, Imperial College London

December 2, 2022
3:00pm-4:00pm
Hybrid Event: 8 Saint Mary’s Street (PHO 203) & Zoom

Robert Shorten
Professor of Cyber-physical Systems
Imperial College London

Digital Ledger Technology, Social Contracts and the Design of Cyber-Physical Systems

We describe how Distributed Ledger Technologies can be used to enforce social contracts and to orchestrate the behavior of agents trying to access a shared resource. Social contracts are rules and social conventions that govern what is deemed to be good behavior when agents interact with an environment. Unfortunately, many of these rules are either poorly designed, leading to inefficient/unfair allocation of resources, or were conceptualized when technology did not permit personalized feedback (nudges) to reward good behavior. The first part of the talk will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Distributed Ledger Technologies architectures to implement certain control systems for such applications. We then focus on a specific type of DLT based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). In this setting we propose a set of delay differential equations to describe the dynamical behavior of a specific DAG based distributed ledger. The final part of the talk discusses the design of social contracts and their design based on the use of DLT’s. Specifically, we present a scheme to price personalized risk in sharing economy applications. We provide proofs for the convergence of the proposed stochastic system and highlight several applications of our technology. Examples where control can play a role in this area will be presented.

Robert Shorten is a Professor of Cyber-physical Systems at the Dyson School of Engineering Design at Imperial College London. He is also Deputy Head of Department and affiliated with University College Dublin. He is a co-founder of the Hamilton Institute at Maynooth University, which he led with Director, Douglas Leith. He was also a Senior Research Manager (Dept. head) at IBM Research, where he led the Control and Optimization Team at the Smart City Research lab. He is also former Professor of Decision Science and Control Theory at University College Dublin. Shorten’s research interests include Smart Mobility and Smart Cities; Control Theory and Dynamics; Hybrid Dynamical Systems; Networking; Linear Algebra; Sharing Economy; and DAG based distributed ledgers.

Faculty Host: Christos Cassandras
Student Host: Andres Chavez Armijos