SUTD Associate Professor Roland Bouffanais visited CSE

On December 16, 2019, Dr. Roland Bouffanais, Associate Professor of Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) visit the College of Control Science and Engineering (CSE), Zhejiang University (ZJU).

Dr. Bouffanais gave a report at 1.30 pm in Room 105, CSE New Building. Prof. HOU Dibo, Vice Dean of the CSE College, hosted the meeting and expressed a warm welcome on behalf of the college.

The report title is “Optimal Network Topology for Responsive Collective Dynamics”. Animals, humans, and robotic multi-agent systems usually operate in dynamic environments, where the ability to respond to changing circumstances is of paramount importance. An effective collective response requires suitable information transfer among agents, and thus is critically dependent on the agents’ interaction network. In this talk, Dr. Bouffanais presented the recent results published in Science Advances of his team, providing theoretical and experimental results about the emergent collective response of a swarm to perturbations of varying frequencies/timescales. These results have far-reaching practical implications for the design and understanding of distributed systems, since they highlight that a dynamic rewiring of the interaction network is essential to the effective collective operations of multi-agent systems at different time- scales. 

Dr. Bouffanais also introduced the members and directions of his research team, and had discussion with the CSE scholars and students in research methods, implementation design as well as application in water environment.

Roland Bouffanais is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). His research focuses on the interdisciplinary applications at the intersections of complexity, network science, control theory, machine learning, and multi-agent systems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in top scientific journals and conference proceedings. He authored Design and Control of Swarm Dynamics (2016) -- the only full-length book on the subject --in Springer’s Complexity Series. He received his Ph.D from EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) in computational science for which he was awarded the prestigious IBM Research Prize in Computational Sciences (2008), and the ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Award Silver Medal (2007). He was a postdoctoral fellow and associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and remains a research associate with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Reported by: SHI Fei

Photo: ZHU Yanni

Editor: WANG Jing