January 20, 2012, Webb 1100

This talk considers finite-horizon distributed linear quadratic robust control problems with arbitrary information structure. As opposed to the stochastic distributed control problem, which is known to be very complex with nonlinear controllers outperforming the linear ones in general, we show that linear controllers are optimal in the deterministic setting and can be found by convex optimization.

Dr. Ather Gattami is currently an assistant professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, ACCESS Linnaeus Centre, Electrical Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden. He received the M.S. in Engineering Physics in 2003 and Ph.D. degree in Engineering Sciences in 2007, both from Lund University, Sweden. He pursued his Master's Thesis in 2003 at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. During 2008, he did his post doc studies at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), MIT, Boston, USA. Dr. Gattami is supervising a number of doctorate and graduate students at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. His main interests are Decision Theory, Game Theory, Optimization, Information Theory, and Computer Science, with applications in the industry.