Welcome to IDeA Labs!
Welcome to BYU's Information and Decision Laboratories (IDeA Labs). IDeA Labs is a network of laboratories operated by a single, interdisciplinary research group. This group uses systems, control theory, and related tools to analyze and design a variety of complex systems and information processing techniques.
Vasu Chetty Defends Ph.D. Dissertation
Vasu Chetty became IDeA Labs’ first Ph.D. graduate on Thusday when he successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “Theory and Applications of Network Structure of Complex Dynamical Systems.” Vasu’s accomplishments included generalizing the definition of the Dynamical Structure Function to arbitrary causal linear time-invariant systems, identifying necessary and suffecient conditions for network reconstruction–highlighting the fact that target specificity is not necessary (as previously thought), and developing a new technique for determining the meaning, or semantics, of partial structure representations of network systems.
Visitor from France Talks about Granger Causality in Networks
Mónika Józsa, a Ph.D. candidate at the École des Mines de Douai in France, visited IDeA Labs and spoke about the relationship between Granger causality of a stochastic process and the graph structure of its realizations.
“We will show that Granger non-causalities between processes corresponds to zero-blocks of the system matrices in a linear time-invariant state-space representation of these processes. One of the applications is to model the causal structure of brain activity which will be illustrated with an example,” she said.
Charles Johnson Awarded ORCA Scholarship to Research Connection between Cascading Failures and Network Instability.
Undergraduate lab member Charles Johnson received a 2017 ORCA research grant to study failure modes of dynamical systems. This research will help bridge gaps in cyber-physical security research, designed to analyze systems for inherit vulnerabilities to attacks. It aims to shed light on the question of how much system failure a cyber attacker with limited access can cause in the real world.
Emily Prigmore Awarded ORCA Scholarship to Model Ecological Phenomenon of Yellowstone National Park
Emily Prigmore has received and ORCA grant of $1500 for her research in modeling the ecological phenomenon of Yellowstone National Park. Since wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone twenty years ago, there have been many ecological changes regarding other animals and plants in the area. Emily’s research is using Lotka-Volterra equations and pursuit-evasion games to model the population and behavior dynamics of various animals and plants in Yellowstone since wolf reintroduction. The purpose of this research is to better understand the consequences of species elimination and introduction.
Alumnus Enoch Yeung Speaks in CS Department Colloquium
Thursday, IDeA Labs Alumus Enoch Yeung will be the speaker in the CS Department Colloquium. Yeung authored 8 papers and produced an Honors Thesis on the representation of structured systems while at IDeA Labs before pursuing a Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech. Currently he is a Research Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in the Data Science and Analytics Group of the Computational Statistics and Analytics Division. His talk, entitled “Understanding and Engineering Biologically Inspired Computing Architectures” will explore many of the themes that permeate his undergraduate, graduate, and current research.
Alumnus Anurag Rai visits from MIT
Former IDeA Labs student Anurag Rai visited lab meeting and spoke about his current research at MIT in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. His Ph.D. research focuses on backpressure routing algorithms yielding maximum throughput in networks. While at BYU, Anurag authored 6 papers and produced a masters thesis addressing the theory of structure in network systems.
IDeA Labs Students Attend Conference on Decision and Control in Las Vegas
Eight IDeA Labs graduate and undergraduate students, and their resident postdoctoral associate Alma Wilson, made the trek with their advisor, Professor Warnick, to Las Vegas to attend the 2016 Conference on Decision and Control, December 12th - 14th. This premier meeting, sponsored by IEEE, SIAM, and INFORMS, brings leading researchers from around the world together to present the latest results in systems and control theory and its applications.
Three former lab members welcomed their lab-mates at the conference.
Professor Beck Visits from UIUC
Carolyn Beck, Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, visited IDeA Labs and spoke in the Computer Science Colloquium. Carolyn, who received her Ph.D. from Caltech, her M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, and her B.S. from California State Polytechnic University, all in Electrical Engineering, also is the recipient of national research awards (NSF CAREER and ONR Young Investigator) and local teaching awards.
Professor Warnick Invited to Speak at Oak Ridge National Labs and the INFORMS Annual Meeting
While on a whirlwind visit to Tennessee and Washington DC, Professor Warnick made his first visit to Oak Ridge National Laboratories, where he spoke on the mathematical representations of networks and subtle distinctions in their interpretations. Spending the day in the area, he toured the facilities at ONRL and met with researchers at UT Knoxville.
The trip was nestled between visits to Vanderbilt and Washington DC, and the annual INFORMS meeting in Nashville.
About Us
Welcome to BYU's Information and Decision Laboratories (IDeA Labs). IDeA Labs is a network of laboratories operated by a single, interdisciplinary research group. This group uses systems, control theory, and related tools to analyze and design a variety of complex systems and information processing techniques.
Each laboratory in the network houses projects that are related by a common application area. This focus allows students to investigate concrete problems, work with industrial partners, and collaborate with academic application experts.
By unifying these laboratories with a common group, we concentrate our research on fundamental issues of processing information in complex, uncertain environments. Students working on a project in one lab often discover that the nature of their problem is very similar to an entirely different problem in a completely different area. This focus on the theoretical foundation unifying different application domains helps students to think more deeply about their research.
