On May 19th 2010, Minyi Zhong defended his PhD dissertation at Boston University. His dissertation topic is “Distributed control and optimization for power limited cooperative systems”. Minyi Zhong is a graduate student of Boston University’s Division of Systems Engineering. His dissertation committee includes Prof. Christos G. Cassandras (adviser) and Prof. John Baillieul, Prof. Yannis Paschalidis and Prof. Calin Belta.

Zhong started with the outline of the talk and a summary of the main contributions of his dissertation. His research work is focused on designing control algorithms for distributed systems, especially those wireless power limited systems such as sensor networks and mobile robotic networks. The application areas of his research include environmental monitoring and exploration, surveillance and reconnaissance, search and rescue in disaster relief, etc.

He then went on to explain that a distributed system consists of a collection of autonomous computing devices, often called nodes or agents, each of which has locally accessible control and data. These nodes communicate over a network through message passing and jointly perform a single task, provide a single service or share some common resources. He pointed out that the main theme of the research in distributed system is the design of intelligence local node algorithms which run on distributed hardware, consume local data and produce some desirable global system-wide behavior.

The main mathematical machinery used in Zhong’s research in distributed control is distributed optimization. In the distributed optimization framework he introduced, a control task of the distributed systems is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem, which is then decomposed in series of sub-problems and each sub-problem is solved by a node of system. A key issue addressed by Zhong’s research is how to reduce the communication involved in a distributed cooperative system. His solution involves using node state estimation and event-driven communication so that only when a node finds out that its teammate’s estimate of its state is off by a certain threshold, a communication event will be triggered. Two types of threshold process were introduced (static and dynamic) and their convergence properties are analyzed.

He then illustrated the effectiveness of this event-driven communication scheme by applying it to the sensor network coverage and data collection problem, which is another main problem studied in his dissertation. Towards the end of his presentation, he showed talked about the robotic research platforms used in his experiment. The first one is based on Khepera III, which is a miniature robot with onboard processing and communication capability. But it lacks the ability to perform localization without outside help. The next platform is assembled using off-the-shelf components such as iRobot Create, laser range finder, webcam, netbook. Zhong then showed a video of these robots carrying out coverage control mission, in which he demonstrated this platform’s ability to perform self-localization based on laser scan data and vision-based event detection ability. Throughout the defense, Zhong answered questions from the committee members as well as from the general public.

Jiayin Tian

On May 10th 2010 Marcelo Gleiser gave a very inspiring talk at the University of New Hampshire. The lecture’s title was: A Tear at the Edge of Creation, which is also the title of professor Gleiser’s new book. The lecture was part of the CEPS Frontiers Lecture Series.

Marcelo Gleiser is a distinguished physicist and astronomer. He holds the Appleton Professorship of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College. In his career so far he authored more than eighty peer reviewed publications as well as three books in popular science. He is the recipient of many awards.

Professor Gleiser’s talk focused on the significance of asymmetries in our universe that made our lives possible. In the first part of his lecture, he gave a brief historical overview of the research of the “heavens”. He argues that everyone so far has been looking for a unified explanation of the universe and it’s laws, starting with the ancient Egyptians, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Newton and all the way to Einstein. In Gleiser’s opinion, this might not be the right way of thinking, especially if one accepts that our universe is based on fundamental imperfections and asymmetries. He then goes on to explain how time, matter and life are all asymmetric. Time can expand only in one direction, because it is very improbable that things would go “backward”, towards less entropy. Secondly, the universe which we can observe is full of matter and lacking anti-matter. This seems to be a physical necessity, which also creates asymmetry. Finally life on Earth is also asymmetric. For example amino acids in the DNA are “left-handed” while “right-handed” amino acids can be fatal for humans.

Gleiser hypothesizes that self-aware intelligent life in the universe is very improbable and this is why in his opinion it is very unlikely that we will get in contact with other intelligent life forms. Because of this, we should cherish life on our planet and be “humancentrists”.

Professor Gleiser’s lecture was very interesting and witty at the same time. His clever remarks kept a constant smile on many faces. His great way of presenting keeps the audience’s attention easily on topic. I would suggest the book to everyone interested in knowing more about the nature of the universe and life in it.

You can follow up on this and similar topics on the 13.7 blog site, where professor Gleiser is one of the four contributors.

Oszkar

Note: This post originally appeared on the Project54 website.

Here at Project54, we have opportunities to provide cutting-edge technology to not just law enforcement agencies but to local fire departments and to the National Guard as well. The National Guard from Concord, NH has a military utility vehicle used in responding to massive hazardous material situations. While the vehicle is out in the field amongst the hazardous chemicals, the troops need to relay information about these chemicals (and the environment) back to the command center vehicle, located elsewhere in a safe area. Project54 engineers had developed a system to provide both a computer interface to collect data from all their instruments and a wireless network between the command center vehicle and the field utility vehicle. Below are a few photos of the National Guard’s utility vehicle. Feel free to see more photos here at our Flickr account.

I would like to mention that it was a pleasure meeting these folks. Thank you for your service and if you ever have a chance to speak with them (they perform HazMat demonstrations here at UNH) I recommend doing so!

Mark Taipan