Evolutionary Decision-Making Dynamics Among Networks of Autonomous Agents

Department of Electrical Engineering Seminar

Ming Cao
Professor
University of Groningen Groningen
The Netherlands

"Evolutionary Decision-Making Dynamics Among Networks of Autonomous Agents"

Whether humans in a community, fish in a school, or robots in a team, simple decisions or actions by interacting individuals can lead to complex and unpredictable outcomes in a population. Research on these systems at a broader scale, perhaps subject to simplification of the agent-level dynamics, can help to characterize critical properties such as convergence, stability, controllability, robustness, and performance. Correspondingly, an extensive literature has emerged in the field of evolutionary games on networks, particularly regarding the question of how cooperation can evolve and persist under various conditions and in various population structures. In this talk, I will provide a brief survey of some recent results in the analysis and control of evolutionary dynamics. In particular, I will focus on two classes of decision-making strategies, namely imitation and best- response, and show how they might lead to dramatically different collective dynamics. Using the robotic fish testbed in my lab as an motivating example, I will also illustrate how to apply classical tools and new ideas to control such complex dynamics.

Ming Cao is a professor of networks and robotics with the Engineering and Technology Institute (ENTEG) at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He received his Bachelor and Master degrees in 1999 and 2002 respectively from Tsinghua University, and his PhD degree in 2007 from Yale University, all in electrical engineering. From September 2007 to August 2008, he was a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He has worked briefly as a research intern in the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He is the 2017 recipient of the Manfred Thoma medal from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for outstanding contributions to the field of systems and control as a young researcher under 40. He is the 2016 recipient of the European Control Award sponsored by the European Control Association (EUCA) for fundamental contributions to distributed and cooperative control of multi-agent systems and complex networks. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, and Systems and Control Letters. He is the vice chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Large Scale Complex Systems; he is also a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems. His main research interests are in autonomous robots, multi-agent systems, and complex networks.

Monday, November 26
2:30 pm
Becton Seminar Room, Becton Center