Reconstructing the topology of an unknown network from observational data

Donatello Materassi
Minnesota University

DEIB - Conference Room "E. Gatti" (Building 20)
January 10^th, 2023
12.00 pm

Contacts:
Simone Formentin

Research Line:
Control systems

Sommario

On January 10th, 2023 at 12.00 pm  Donatello Materassi, Professor at the University of Minnesota, will give a seminar on "Reconstructing the topology of an unknown network from observational data" in DEIB Conference Room.

The interest for networks and dynamical systems has been increasing in the past years, especially because of their capability of modeling and describing a large variety of phenomena and behaviors. The principal advantages provided by a networked system are a modular approach to design, the possibility of directly introducing redundancy and the realization of distributed and parallel algorithms. All these advantages have led to considering networked systems in the realization of many technological devices. At the same time, it is not surprising that natural and biological systems tend to exhibit strong modularity as well. Interconnected systems are successfully exploited to perform novel modeling approaches in many fields such as Economics, Biology, Cognitive Sciences, Ecology and Geology. The talk aims to be a deep dive into the problem of reconstructing the topology of an unknown dynamical network, since such a problem poses formidable theoretical and practical challenges, especially when only observational data are available. Several scenarios are addressed, trying to form a picture as general and complete as possible.

Biografia

Donatello Materassi holds a Laurea in “Ingegneria informatica” and a “Dottorato di Ricerca” in Electrical Engineering/Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems from Universita’ degli Studi di Firenze, Italy. He has been a research associate at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) in 2008-2011, and concurrently a post-doctoral researcher at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a lecturer at Harvard University in 2011-2014. In 2014, he became an assistant professor at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Since 2020 he has been an associate professor at University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). His main research interests are graphical models, stochastic systems and cybernetics.