19/01/2021 – 14h00-15h00 – Online
Personalized optimization for cyber-physical and social systems
Andrea Simonetto (IBM Research Ireland)
Abstract. Optimization is the cornerstone of many engineering systems and cyber-physical systems including smart homes, energy grids, and intelligent transportation systems. In many situations however, state-of-the-art optimization algorithms may fail to provide acceptable (and feasible) solutions e.g. because of the scale of the problem, because the problem is continuously changing in time, or because the problem is ill-posed (i.e., depends on a cost function that is unknown).
In this talk, I will focus on how to build an online algorithm to solve a time-varying optimization problem with an objective that comprises a known time-varying cost and an unknown function. This problem structure arises in cyber-physical and social systems where the known function captures time-varying engineering costs, and the unknown function models user’s satisfaction; in this context, the objective is to strike a balance between given performance metrics and user’s satisfaction that has to be learn online and concurrently with the execution of the optimization algorithm. I will then touch upon applications in this area stemming from smart energy grids and vehicle control.
The talk main references are the papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.00775; https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.06932; https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04363.
Biography. Andrea Simonetto is a research staff member in the AI & Quantum team of IBM Research Ireland, in Dublin. He received his PhD in systems and control from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands in 2012, and spent 3+1 years as postdoc, first in the signal processing group in the electrical engineering department in Delft, then in the applied mathematics department of the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. He was a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, and KTH, Sweden. He joined IBM Research in February 2017.
His interests span optimization, control, and signal processing, with applications in smart energy, smart transportation, personalized health, and quantum computing
Practical details. The seminar will take place online, using Microsoft Teams. If you want to attend this seminar (or any of the forthcoming online Automatiques seminars), and if you do not already have access to the AutoSeminar group on Teams, simply send an email and you will be invited. Please specify which email address the invitation must be sent to (this has to be the address associated with your Teams account). You will find the link to the seminar on the « General » AutoSeminar channel on Teams, approximately 15 minutes before the beginning.
The technical side of things: you can use Teams either directly from you web browser or using the « fat client », which is available for most platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Android & iOS). We strongly recommend the latter option whenever possible. Please give it a try before the seminar to anticipate potential problems.
