October 3rd, 2024
Spikes and rhythms organize control and communication in the animal world, in contrast to the bits and clocks of digital technology. As continuous-time signals that can be counted, spikes have a mixed nature. This talk will review ongoing efforts to develop a control theory of spiking systems. The central thesis is that the mixed nature of spiking results from a mixed feedback principle, and that a control theory of mixed feedback can be grounded in the operator theoretic concept of maximal monotonicity. As a nonlinear generalization of passivity, maximal monotonicity acknowledges at once the physics of electrical circuits, the algorithmic tractability of convex optimization, and the feedback control theory of incremental passivity. We discuss the relevance of a theory of spiking control systems in the emerging age of event-based technology.
Bio: Rodolphe Sepulchre is professor of engineering at the KU Leuven (Belgium) since 2023 and at the University of Cambridge (UK) since 2013. He is a fellow of IFAC (2020), IEEE (2009), and SIAM (2015). He received the IEEE CSS Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize in 2008 and the IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award in 2020. He was elected at the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2013. He is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Control Systems. He is a recipient of two ERC advanced grants (Switchlets (2015-2021) and SpikyControl (2023-2028)).
Slides of the conference: click here
