Christoforos Hadjicostis

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Talk: Resilient Distributed Average Consensus

Recent developments in digital systems and networking technologies have led to the emergence of complex systems that need to be managed/controlled over cyber infrastructures, such as wireless and wired broadband networks. The emergence of this type of network control systems, which range from smart grids and transportation networks of various sorts, to embedded electronic devices and robotic networks, has sparked huge interest in distributed control and coordination problems. In this talk, we present recent progress in this area by focusing on an operation that is key for several such tasks: the distributed computation of the average (more generally, a weighted linear combination) of distinct parameters held at different agents of a multi-agent system. We discuss strategies for resilient distributed average consensus, including the handling of adversarial network conditions, such as packet drops on the communication links, and/or faulty/malicious agents. We also report recent progress on the use of local invariance conditions for performing anytime error detection/correction and for collectively removing the effects of previous communication exchanges with agents that are subsequently determined to be faulty/malicious.

Bio: Christoforos Hadjicostis received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1999 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. From 1999-2007, he was with the Faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2007, he has been with the University of Cyprus, where he is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interim Director of the Daedalus Research Center on Cyber-physical Systems. His research focuses on fault diagnosis and tolerance in distributed dynamic systems, discrete event systems, error control coding, and applications to network security and anomaly detection. Dr. Hadjicostis is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems and Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He is a fellow of IEEE.