Abstract

Abstract. This talk will showcase how exploiting structural properties in natural and engineered dynamical systems can greatly simplify design and verification tasks. We will begin with the structure of genetic circuits and multicellular interactions that generate spatiotemporal phenomena essential to developmental biology. We will then demonstrate our synthetic circuit designs that reproduced such phenomena in live cells. Moving from synthetic biology to engineering, we will address the problem of verifying performance and safety of autonomous systems, with control stacks that integrate control, planning, and decision-making layers. Vital to this verification process is reachability analysis, which is a major computational challenge for complex systems. We will explain how exploiting dynamical properties has helped us overcome this challenge, resulting in computationally efficient and scalable reachability methods. The talk will conclude with a discussion of open problems and research opportunities.

Biography. Murat Arcak is a professor at U.C. Berkeley in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering. He received the B.S. degree from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (1996) and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1997 and 2000). He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a member of ACM and SIAM , and a fellow of IEEE and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).