EECS Colloquium: Feedback Motion Planning with Sum-of-Squares Verification

In this talk, I will present a nonlinear feedback control synthesis algorithm which combines randomized motion planning algorithms, popular in robotics, with sum of squares optimization. In order to drive the system to a goal state or limit cycle, the algorithm systematically populates the controllable subset of state space with a sparse set of trajectories which are locally stabilized with linear feedback and verified with sums of squares; we have now developed efficient methods for performing this verification along trajectories and around limit cycles, on systems with hybrid dynamics, and on systems with mixed polynomial/trigonometric nonlinearities.

TRUST Security Seminar: Electronic Voting Security in India

India uses paperless electronic voting machines (EVMs) nationwide, and the Election Commission of India, the country’s highest election authority, has long maintained that the machines are “perfect,” “infallible,” and “fully tamper-proof.”

New Media RoundTable: Student Research Panel, Caitlin Marshall and William Brown III

Caitlin Marshall’s larger research focuses on voice prosthesis and synthesis, minority discourse, and the sound of civics. Each year in America ten to twelve thousand individuals undergo cancer treatment necessitating laryngectomy, the surgical removal of the larynx. With their sound sources removed, laryngectomees are rendered mute. To counter what many patients describe as the disability of silence, nearly all opt for prosthesis and speech therapy.

Research Exchange: Formal Methods for Dependable Computing: From Models, through Software, to Circuits

Computing has become ubiquitous and indispensable: it is embedded all around us, in cell phones, automobiles, medical devices, and much more. This ubiquity brings with it a growing challenge to ensure that our computing infrastructure is also dependable and secure. We need to develop and maintain complex software systems on top of increasingly unreliable computing substrates under stringent resource constraints such as energy usage.

Research Exchange: Leveraging Machine-learning and Crowdsourcing to Process Text Messages in the world’s Less-resourced Language

Text-messaging has quickly become the dominant form of remote communication in much of the world, surpassing email, phone calls and even grid electricity. This has social development and crisis response organizations to leverage mobile technologies to support health, banking, access to market information, literacy and emergency response.

October 2010 Newsletter

This newsletter covers the recent SCHEME meeting to promote collaborations of engineers, doctors, and health administrators; and the Teleimmersion for Physicians project

Research Exchange: The Google Book Settlement as Copyright Reform

The proposed Google Book Search (GBS) settlement can be viewed as a way to achieve copyright reform through the class action settlement process. This is especially evident in its plan for commercializing orphan works and in the compromises it embodies concerning revenue splits for authors and publishers in respect of ambiguous contracts about e-book rights and its new procedures to ensure that author reversion rights will be effectuated.

Workshop: Enabling Technologies Development Project

The goal is to develop new and innovative technologies that will lead to 10x the capabilities of current products at 1/10x the cost. An additional even more challenging goal is to also achieve 10x reliability. The intent of the project is to also promote research collaboration between the universities, national laboratories, and private industry.

July newsletter online

This recent newsletter has stories on (1) Cory Hall Testbed project through i4Energy, which installed a network of
monitoring equipment to track the flow and use of electricity, and (2) a new program, Cleantech to Market, that is
partnering with CITRIS to help select suitable clean energy projects and bring them to
market.