Bordeaux University, IMS-lab, Building A31
351 cours de la Libération - 33405 Talence - France
Email: ali.zolghadri@ims-bordeaux.fr - Tel : +33 5 4000 2416 (direct)

Author: admin_AZ

Covid travel restrictions: stay of Prof. Lee in Bordeaux has been cancelled

Due to covid-19 travel restrictions, the stay of Prof. Edward Lee in April has been canceled – and will hopefully be postponed.

Stay of Prof. Edward Lee – UC Berkeley, USA – at the IMS lab (April 2020)

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.

 

Invited plenary talk at the ICINCO 2019 conference

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.

 

Some panel discussions and open talks

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:

  • 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.

Talk at the second annual meeting of the SysNum cluster

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.

 

Invited plenary talk at SAFEPROCESS 2018 – IFAC conference

 I gave a plenary talk at SAFEPROCESS 2018IFAC on “Model-based FDIR for aerospace and flight-critical systems”. SAFAPROCESS 2018 took place on 29 August-1 September 2018, Warsaw, Poland.

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©Ali Zolghadri - 2019