I gave a plenary talk at the 5th International Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems (IEEE SysTol) 2021. See at here.
Author: admin_AZ
I welcome applications for doctoral study and postdoctoral visitors in areas relevant to my research interests for working on challenging scientific projects.
Interested applicants : Possible research topics are: Reachability analysis and safety verification of neural networks — Safety and Security of Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems: new methods and algorithms — Model-based, set-based and data-driven methods for multi-sensor data fusion in navigation systems, with application to future civil aviation operations — Fault diagnosis, fault management, autonomy and resilience issues in future aircraft systems — Symbolic methods for control of complex and non-linear systems …
I am happy also to consider students’ own proposals. If you are interested in a PhD / postdoc position, please email me.
Postdoc 2022 openings
Dr. Carlos Trapiello (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – UPC, Barcelona, Spain) received a research grant from UPC to do a one-year research stay in Bordeaux. See his CV at here.
He will work with Dr. Christophe Combastel and myself on safety and security issues in cyber-physical systems using set membership techniques.
Period : 15 January 2022 — 15 January 2023.
Postdoc 2020-2021 (closed):
Due to coronavirus outbreak, postdoc recruitment in 2020 has been delayed to fall 2020.
- The first call can be downloaded at here. This call is now closed. Dr. Arthour Perodou has been hired since Sptember 2020. See his CV at here.
- Second postdoc position is related to the COCOTIER project. This call is also closed. Dr. Sara Ifqir will be continuing one year more.
postdoc 2019 (closed):
- Sara IFQIR started on December 2, 2019 to work on the COCOTIER Project. See her CV at here.
- After a two-year postdoc position in Bordeaux supported by SysNum, Willy Alejandro Apaza Perez left IMS-lab in May 2020 for L2S-lab (Paris) to continue his research under the supervision of Dr. Antoine Girard. Good continuation Alejandro !
Today, the Airbus A350 XWB is the most modern and efficient commercial jetliner globally. Since January 2015, this aircraft has been operating worldwide with an advanced and robust model-based monitoring system onboard. This significant accomplishment is the result of a collaborative effort between my research team and Airbus, beginning in the mid-2000s, to address Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) challenges in aircraft systems. With current airworthiness certification standards in civil aviation, extremely rigorous specifications must be satisfied, not only in nominal flight regimes, but also in extreme, unusual, non-standard/off-nominal and unexpected flight conditions. The certification testifies that new systems meet all requirements set by the aviation regulatory authorities — FAA (USA) and EASA (Europe) — and that they themselves do not introduce new risks. Developing flight-proven and certified model-based monitoring systems was a complex endeavor that demanded years of dedicated research and innovation, rigorous verification and validation activities, as well as in-flight tests and continuous refinement.
December 2020: Five years after the first A350 commercial flight, this note posted on the IFAC Blog and IFAC social media looks back at some lessons learnt from this amazing success story. The note has been prepared by Dr. Philippe Goupil (eXpert FDIR – A/C Control Architecture & Functions, Airbus, Toulouse – France) and myself. See also IFAC Newsletter, December 2020.
A. Zolghadri – IMS Bordeaux, France
P. Goupil – Airbus, Toulouse, France
What about the future? In civil aviation operations, the vector is pointed toward more autonomy and intelligence in the cockpit. Future avionics will have to ensure more autonomy and must provide safety functionalities at least equivalent to those of today blended-crew task environments, while coupled to a new cockpit concept. The reduced-crew operation model is set to assume a more prominent role, marking a significant shift due to the removal of onboard human redundancy. The challenges include the need for advanced, disruptive onboard assistant tools, and enhanced ground support to aid in emergencies or take control of the aircraft in the event of pilot incapacitation. See:
A. Zolghadri (2024). A review of fault management issues in aircraft systems: Current status and future directions. Progress in Aerospace Sciences (elsevier). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paerosci.2024.101008. Available online at here.
Due to covid-19 travel restrictions, the stay of Prof. Edward Lee in April has been canceled – and will hopefully be postponed.
I have the pleasure to welcome Prof. Edward A. Lee (Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor, University of California — Berkeley, USA) in April 2020 in Bordeaux. Prof. Lee is an internationally recognized pioneer in research in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). He has delivered more than 180 keynote talks and other invited talks at venues worldwide (h-index=84 with more than 48000 citations). He has pointed out the failure of standard abstraction layers, the need of reliable timing behavior, and lack of temporal semantics of existing programming language models for CPS design. Prof. Lee has led the development of several influential open-source software packages, notably Ptolemy and its various spinoffs. See his resume here.
During his stay, he will share his experience on open issues in CPS modeling, control and safety management, and emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) issues. His coming to the University of Bordeaux is supported by the cluster SysNum. He will give a conference on “interaction, observation (and Determinism and Free Will)” on April 14, 2020, at 10:00, at the IMS lab:
Abstract:
Interaction is more powerful than observation. This may help to explain the recent revolution in machine learning, the power of feedback systems, the limitations of the Turing-Church model of computation, the differences between cyber-physical systems and computing systems, and the limits of objectivity. But what is interaction? It requires first-person involvement, a self, but the concept of "a self" is treacherous. In this talk, I examine the differences between interaction and observation from a technical point of view. I leverage the results of four Turing Award winners, starting with the concept of a zero-knowledge proof (introduced by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali), which requires first-person interaction. I continue with Judea Perle's demonstration that observation of data alone, without any interaction with the mechanisms that produce the data, cannot be used, by itself, to infer causality. It reveals only correlation. I then show that this observation has a strong connection to a classic result by Robin Milner, who shows that two automata that cannot be distinguished by observation alone may be able to be distinguished through interaction. These technical interpretations of interactions lead inevitably to treacherous ground, connecting with deep philosophical questions about determinism and free will.
More details will be available soon.
I gave a plenary talk at the 16th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics 2019 – 29-31 July, Prague, Czech Republic.
The abstract, video and pdf file of the talk are available at here.
I have given a number of open conferences and interviews for the general public, and participated to panel debates at international or French events. Below some selected ones since 2016:
- Panel discussion at ICINCO 2019. Theme: The rise of Artificial Intelligence: Now, Near and Far.
- Panel discussion at MEA 2017. Theme: Innovation in aerospace.
- A short YouTube video on my CNRS Innovation medal:
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Appeard in the French journal “La tribune”. Theme: Future Single Pilot Operations (2030+), and self-piloting and self-learning planes (2050+). See here.
- Press conference (in French) organized by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) on perspectives and applications in control“. See here.
- Invited talk (general public, in French): Les mardis de l’innovation, November 2016, CNRS, Paris, France. Theme: Connected transport.
- Invited talk (general public, in French) at the “Fédération de Recherche du CNRS Charles Hermite”, November 2016, Nancy, France. Theme: Numerical sciences and industry 4.0.
The second annual meeting of the SysNum cluster took place in Bordeaux on 1-2 April 2019. During this meeting with the International Scientific Advisory Board, I gave a talk on “Abstraction-based control synthesis for interconnected systems using distributed and partial information”.
The slides can be downloaded at here.
I gave a plenary talk at SAFEPROCESS 2018 — IFAC on “Model-based FDIR for aerospace and flight-critical systems”. SAFAPROCESS 2018 took place on 29 August-1 September 2018, Warsaw, Poland.
