Warnick Speaks at Allerton

September 30, 2015

Profesor Warnick was one of a number of speakers invited to present their work at the 53rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing this year. Continuing his focus on network representations and thier meanings, his talk described the kinds of network stuctures that emerge when one interconnects different subsystems together to form a single composite system. In particular, he demonstrated that the type of network realized by Directed Information Graphs, Linear Dynamical Graphs, Dynamical Structure Functions, and Minimal Generative Model Graphs are signal structures, which can be very different from a system’s interconnection structure of its subsytems. The distinction, he argued, is the posture towards shared hidden state between systems–subsystems never share state, while signal structures may or may not share state. This position of agnosticism towards shared hidden state enable signla structures to have a much lower information cost for identification form data than subsystem structures do. See the paper here or presentation here for more details about these relationships between signal and susbstyem structure.