ECE Seminar Speaker: Francesco Bullo

Description

Francesco Bullo, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will give a talk for the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.

Abstract:

I survey recent progress on the development of contraction theory for dynamical systems, as a robust and computationally-friendly stability theory. Starting from basic notions, I will present novel theoretical developments and examples of contracting dynamics, including gradient systems, constrained optimization solvers, and multiplayer games. As first application I will discuss online feedback optimization, where a dynamic plant is interconnected with a controller based on first-order optimization methods. Second, I will discuss the contractivity properties of recurrent neural networks and briefly review applications to unsupervised representation learning, implicit learning models, and reservoir computing.