IEEE CSS President, UCSB Prof. Francesco Bullo visited CSE

On July 31, 2018, invited by Professor CHEN Jiming, the IEEE CSS President, Professor Francesco Bullo from the University of California, Santa Barbara visited the College of Control Science and Engineering (CSE) at Zhejiang University (ZJU).

In Room 501 of the CSE New Building, Prof. Bullo gave a talk, named as “On the Dynamics of Opinions and Influence Systems”. This talk presented models for the evolution of opinions, interpersonal influences and social power in a group of individuals. Prof. Bullo first talked about the empirical data and mathematical models for the opinion formation process in deliberative groups, including concepts of self-weight and social power. Especially, He focused on how groups form opinions based on judgment, intelligence, and resource allocation. Then, he showed how the natural dynamical evolution of interpersonal influence structures is shaped by the psychological phenomenon of reflected appraisal. Multi-agent models and analysis results were grounded in influence networks from mathematical sociology, replicator dynamics from evolutionary games, and transactive memory systems from organization science. At the end of the talk, the students actively asked questions and talked with Prof. Bullo on the issues of interest.

After the talk, Prof. Chen introduced the development history and current research situation of ZJU-CSE to Prof. Bullo. They also talked over the relevance of security, big data analysis, network systems and distributed control, and discussed the prospects for further cooperation.

Francesco Bullo is a Professor from the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests focus on network systems, distributed control and their application in robotic coordination, power grids and social networks. He is the coauthor of “Geometric Control of Mechanical Systems” (Springer, 2004) and “Distributed Control of Robotic Networks” (Princeton, 2009); his latest book “Lectures on Network Systems” (Create Space 2018) is available on his website. He received best paper awards for his work in the journals such as IEEE Control Systems, Automatica, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems. He is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. He once served in the editorial boards of IEEE, SIAM, and ESAIM journals, and is now serving as IEEE CSS President.