March 6, 2019: Invited Speaker Seminar: Resilient Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems in the Presence of Malicious Behaviors: A Systems and Control Perspective

Dr. Seyed Mehran Dibaji
MIT

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 4:00 pm
Room EV011.119

Abstract

The comprehensive integration of instrumentation, communication, and control into physical systems has led to the study of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), a field that has recently garnered increased attention. A key concern that is ubiquitous in CPS is a need to ensure security in the face of cyber attacks. In this talk, first, a systems and control perspective for the security of CPS is presented. These methods are classified into three categories based on the type of defense proposed against the cyberattacks: prevention, resilience, and detection & isolation. In the next part of the talk, some of the recent results in resilient consensus problems are presented where the aim is to reach agreement on specific variables that the agents have, but certain agents in the network anonymously try to mislead others. Such malicious agents do not follow the predefined local interaction rules and might prevent the normal agents from coordinating properly. The malicious agents are omniscient in the sense that they have global information regarding the network. In resilient consensus, normal agents update their values by following the predefined control rule based on their neighbors’ information. The malicious agents, on the other hand, update their values arbitrarily with the knowledge of the entire network. Such problems have a wide range of applications in cryptocurrency, multi-robot coordination, connected and autonomous vehicles, and wireless sensor networks.

Biography

Seyed Mehran Dibaji is a postdoctoral associate in MIT, MechE, working on distributed control and cyber-security. Prior to this, in 2016, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computational Intelligence and Systems Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, where his dissertation was about resilient consensus of multi-agent systems. He has B.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering and in Applied Mathematics and a M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Control Engineering, all from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran, in 2009, 2012, and 2012, respectively. His research interests include controls, cyber-security, distributed algorithms, machine learning, data science, cyber-physical systems (IoT), power systems, and autonomous vehicles.