Dissertation or Thesis Defense

Over the past decades we have seen robots move from constrained and heavily designed industrial environments out into the world. Along with this shift there is a need for smaller, safer, and less expensive robots which can complete tasks autonomously in teams, sometimes covering large areas. Multi-robot teams can expand the capabilities of a single […]

Integrating machine learning and control systems has achieved remarkable success in controlling complex dynamical systems such as autonomous vehicles. However, the resulting controlled system often has a neural network (NN) in the loop which represents the system dynamics, control policy, or perception. The nonlinearity and large scale of NNs make it challenging to provide formal […]

The intersection of dynamical systems and networks are used to model a huge variety of phenomena such as the spread of disease, multi-agent systems, opinions in social networks, and more. Many properties of these network phenomena can be understood by examining the eigenvalue spectrum of a matrix representation of the underlying graph. Using this intuition, […]

High-level synthesis has accelerated the adoption of autotuners to explore design spaces. Design-space size increases exponentially in the number of design parameters, and synthesizing a single configuration for a device-scale application easily consumes hours, so existing autotuners are frequently demonstrated with small kernels and few configurations to render the problem tractable. This dissertation shows that […]

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a common way to express a broad range of real-time constraints that can be imposed on control systems. Spatial robustness of STL specifications, quantifying permissible spatial perturbations, has been widely studied in the literature. However, despite the importance of various time-critical systems, temporal robustness of STL has not yet been […]

Epidemiological spreading processes constitute the core of a large number of disparate networks. In some, faster spread is desirable, in others containing the spread is critically important. We focus on understanding the spatio-temporal spread of epidemics over contact networks with the goal of facilitating or containing the spread as the case may be. In this […]