{"id":15792,"date":"2014-11-03T15:35:28","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T20:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/systems\/?p=15792"},"modified":"2022-01-24T17:45:12","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T22:45:12","slug":"cise-hosts-international-symposium-on-control-of-network-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/cise-hosts-international-symposium-on-control-of-network-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"CISE Hosts International Symposium on Control of Network Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/sub>Attendees Celebrate New IEEE Journal Edited by ENG’s Paschalidis<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"SCONES_2809\"
Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) describing a strategy to maximize battery lifetimes in wireless sensor networks at SCONES, held October 27-28 in the Photonics Center Colloquium Room (Photos by Dave Green)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Microbes are all around us\u2014even inside us\u2014and that\u2019s a good thing. Left alone, these tiny organisms have a huge impact on everything from human health to wastewater treatment. But with a little engineering, they could do even more. In certain environments, their metabolic processes could be exploited to make biofuels, vaccines and other useful products and services. To tap their potential, Associate Professor Daniel Segr\u00e8<\/a> (Biology, BME, Bioinformatics) and collaborators have\u00a0developed mathematical models to predict the metabolic interactions that occur among different microbial species under varying environmental conditions, and to design new microbial networks with desired properties.<\/p>\n

Segr\u00e8 presented his\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0at the first\u00a0Symposium on the\u00a0Control of\u00a0Network Systems\u00a0(SCONES), held on October 27-28 in the Photonics Center Colloquium Room.<\/p>\n

Sponsored by the\u00a0IEEE Control Systems Society <\/a>and the\u00a0Center for Information and Systems Engineering\u00a0at Boston University, SCONES celebrated the inaugural\u00a0March 2014 issue\u00a0of the\u00a0IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems <\/i>(<\/i>TCNS<\/i>),<\/i>\u00a0a new\u00a0IEEE Transactions<\/i>\u00a0journal edited by Professor\u00a0Yannis Paschalidis <\/a>(ECE, BME, SE) focused on problems related to the control, design, study, engineering, optimization and emerging behavior of network systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe live in a world that is extremely interconnected,\u201d said Paschalidis, the journal\u2019s editor-in-chief. \u201cThis is also true of systems, biological or manmade, that support our modern way of life. Networks, which both connect system components and influence how they function as a whole, are increasingly the focus of leading edge research, and this is the impetus forTCNS<\/i>\u00a0and SCONES.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TCNS
TCNS Editor-in-Chief Professor Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, SE, BME) (center) with MIT PhD student Andras Gyorgy (left) and another SCONES participant (right) during a poster session.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One author of each paper in the inaugural issue presented at the symposium, along with talks and posters from several other researchers in the field. Representing major research institutions from around the world, SCONES presenters explored the analysis, control and optimization of electric power, computer, communication, transportation, biological, cyber-physical, social and economic networks. As if bringing the\u00a0TCNS\u00a0<\/i>journal to life, the 23 featured speakers illustrated complex concepts with a flurry of equations, algorithms, graphs and diagrams.<\/p>\n

\u201cTCNS<\/i>\u00a0aspires to become the premiere destination for mathematically rigorous work in network systems,\u201d said Magnus Egerstedt, an ECE Professor at Georgia Tech and the\u00a0TCNS<\/i>\u00a0deputy editor-in-chief\u2014and the SCONES presenters lived up to that promise.
\nIn addition to Segr\u00e8, two other Boston University researchers shared highlights of papers they co-authored in the inaugural issue of\u00a0TCNS\u00a0<\/i>on resource allocation and routing, the selection of optimal path by which to transmit information across the nodes of a network.<\/p>\n

Professor\u00a0Lev Levitin<\/a>\u00a0(ECE, SE) presented\u00a0an alternative to wormhole routing<\/a>, a widely used routing technique that\u2019s prone to deadlock\u2014multiple messages getting blocked by one another in a vicious cycle\u2014under heavy computer network traffic. Levitin described a series of new, high-performance algorithms that he, Professor\u00a0Mark Karpovsky<\/a>\u00a0(ECE) and ECE Visiting Researcher Mehmet Mustafa developed to break such cycles and prevent deadlock formation during routing and thus preserve network connectivity.<\/p>\n

\"Professor
Professor Michael Caramanis (ME, SE) (second from right), who chaired the symposium’s first session on control and optimization of electric power networks, with University of Maryland Professor John Baras (ECE) (left), BU Systems Engineering PhD student Bowen Zhang (second from left) and California Institute of Technology Professor Steven Low (ECE) (right) during a break.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Professor\u00a0Christos Cassandras\u00a0<\/a>(ECE, SE) presented an\u00a0optimal control strategy<\/a> that he, Tao Wang (SE, PhD\u201913) and Sepideh Pourazarm (SE, PhD candidate) devised to maximize the lifetime of sensor batteries deployed at each node of a wireless sensor network for surveillance, environmental monitoring or other applications where human intervention may be inconvenient or costly.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause every node has limited energy, you have to worry about the battery dying and the network ceasing to function,\u201d said Cassandras, \u201cso you need to focus on battery lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Modeling each battery as a dynamic system in which energy does not dissipate in a linear fashion, the strategy uses an algorithm to determine the routing scheme that will minimize that energy loss.<\/p>\n

The symposium, which was well-attended and featured many fruitful exchanges between speakers and attendees, signified how well the\u00a0TCNS<\/i> journal has been received by the international research community, Paschalidis observed.<\/p>\n

\"BU
BU Systems Engineering PhD student Tingting Xu and ECE PhD student Theodora Brisimi during a poster session<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIn the first three\u00a0TCNS<\/i>\u00a0issues published in 2014, we have seen papers covering many types of network systems, from networked control and multi-agent systems, to communication, transportation, electric power, biological and social networks,\u201d he noted. \u201cSCONES is playing a key role in coalescing a community of researchers around the journal.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attendees Celebrate New IEEE Journal Edited by ENG’s Paschalidis Microbes are all around us\u2014even inside us\u2014and that\u2019s a good thing. Left alone, these tiny organisms have a huge impact on everything from human health to wastewater treatment. But with a little engineering, they could do even more. In certain environments, their metabolic processes could be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1500,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[268,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15792"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35402,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15792\/revisions\/35402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}