The USC Viterbi School of Engineering, following the recommendation of the Award’s Committee, is honored to announce Professor Xudong Chen of the Washington University in St. Louis as the 2023 winner of the A.V. Balakrishnan Early Career Award for Excellence in Scientific Research.
The Award is funded by the generous support of Ms. Sophia Balakrishnan in memory of her beloved husband Professor A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan, a well-known Professor and Researcher in the area of systems.
Professor Chen was honored and gave an in-person lecture at USC on Tuesday, October 24, 2023. Photos from the 2nd annual A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Awards Ceremony can be found here.
Read about the awards ceremony here.
Biography: Dr. Xudong Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Chen obtained the BS degree in Electronics Engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 2009, and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Harvard University in 2014. Chen is an awardee of the 2020 Air Force Young Investigator Program, a recipient of the 2021 NSF CAREER award, and the recipient of the 2021 Donald P. Eckman award. Chen’s current research interests are in the area of control theory, decision theory, dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and network science.
Awardee Special Lecture: Structure Theory for Nonholonomic Ensemble Systems
Abstract: Ensemble control deals with the problem of using a common control input to simultaneously steer a large population (in the limit, a continuum) of individual control systems. In this talk, we address a fundamental problem in ensemble control theory, namely, system controllability. A key factor in determining controllability of an ensemble system is its underlying parameterization space. Roughly speaking, the bigger the parameterization space is, the more difficult one can control the ensemble. Over the past two decades, significant progress has been made for understanding controllability of ensemble systems over one-dimensional parameterization spaces, yet little is known when the dimensions are greater than one. A major focus of this talk is to present recent advances in controllability of ensemble systems whose parameterization spaces are multi-dimensional. We will consider two classes of ensemble systems, namely, ensembles of linear control systems and ensembles of control-affine systems. We will first show that linear ensemble systems are problematic if their parameterization spaces are greater than one and, then, show how to resolve this controllability issue by using a special class of control-affine ensembles whose control vector fields are equipped with a fine structure.
The 2023 A.V. ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Awards
Ming Hsieh Boardroom, Ronald Tutor Hall, University Park Campus
Tuesday, October 24th, 2023
