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GRASP Seminar Series: Fall 2009
October 2nd, 11:00 a.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)
Shreyas Sundaram
University of Pennsylvania
"Linear Iterative Strategies for Information Dissemination in Distributed Systems"
Abstract: A core requirement in distributed systems and networks is to disseminate information from certain nodes to other nodes. In this talk, we discuss a linear iterative strategy for information dissemination, where each node repeatedly updates its value to be a weighted linear combination of its previous value and those of its neighbors. We show that this strategy can be compactly modeled as a linear dynamical system, and that common information dissemination tasks can be viewed in the context of certain properties of linear systems. Specifically, we make the following connections: (1) accumulating all of the data in the network at certain nodes can be viewed as an observability problem, (2) accumulating all of the data despite the presence of malicious nodes in the network can be viewed as a strong observability problem, and (3) transmitting streams of data from source nodes to sink nodes can be viewed as an invertibility problem.
These connections allow us to leverage tools from structured system theory to design linear iterative strategies to disseminate information in networks. Finally, we discuss the extension of these results to systems over finite fields, and show how this can be applied to the problems of estimation and control in multi-agent systems with quantization constraints.
Biography: Shreyas Sundaram is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. His research interests lie in the areas of secure and fault-tolerant control of distributed systems and networks, linear system and estimation theory, and the application of algebraic graph theory to system analysis. He received the M. E. Van Valkenburg Graduate Research Award and the Robert T. Chien Memorial Award from the ECE department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both for excellence in research. He was a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at the 2007 and 2008 American Control Conferences.
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