[CPCC] Distinguished Seminar by Prof. Ali H. Sayed

[Hamid Jafarkhani]

Title: BIO-INSPIRED COGNITION AND DIFFUSION ADAPTATION OVER NETWORKS

Speaker: Ali H. Sayed

Date: Nov. 17, 2011, Thu.

Time: 1:00-2:00 PM

Venue: 1114 NatSci I

ABSTRACT

Complex patterns of behavior are common in many biological networks,
where no single agent is in command and yet forms of decentralized
intelligence are evident. Examples include fish joining together in
schools, birds flying in formation, bees swarming towards a new hive,
and bacteria diffusing towards a nutrient source. While each
individual agent in these biological networks is not capable of
complex behavior, it is the combined coordination among multiple
agents that leads to the manifestation of sophisticated order at the
network level. The study of these phenomena opens up opportunities for
collaborative research across several domains including economics, life
sciences, biology, and information processing, in order to address and
clarify several relevant questions such as: (a) how and why organized
behavior arises at the group level from interactions among agents
without central control? (b) What communication topologies enable
the emergence of order at the higher level from interactions at the
lower level? (c) How is information quantized during the diffusion of
knowledge through the network? And (d) how does mobility influence the
learning abilities of the agents and the network. Several disciplines
are concerned in elucidating different aspects of these questions
including evolutionary biology, animal behavior studies, physical
biology, and even computer graphics. In the realm of signal processing,
these questions motivate the need to study and develop decentralized
strategies for information processing that are able to endow networks
with real-time adaptation and learning abilities. This presentation
examines several patterns of decentralized intelligence in biological
networks, and describes diffusion adaptation and online learning
strategies that our research group has developed in recent years to
model and reproduce these kinds of behavior.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Ali H. Sayed is Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and Principal Investigator of the UCLA Adaptive
Systems Laboratory (www.ee.ucla.edu/asl <http://www.ee.ucla.edu/asl>).  He
has published widely in the areas of adaptation and learning with over
350 articles and 5 books. His research interests span several fields
including adaptation and learning, adaptive and cognitive networks,
biological networks, cooperative behavior, distributed processing, and
statistical signal processing.