Students Present Research at the American Control Conference

July 8, 2016

Three senior graduate students at IDeA Labs presented their recent results at one of the top meetings for the IEEE Control Systems Society, the American Control Conference, held in Boston this year.

First, Vasu Chetty (Ph.D) presented his paper entitled “Passive Reconstruction of Non-Target-Specific Discrete-Time LTI Systems”(his presentation can be found here). The research, conducted with the undergraduate IDeA Labs mathematician, Joel Eliason, explained a novel methodology for discovering the network structure of a system using only passive measurement and without actively probing it. Although one may have to wait a while, and although there is no guarantee that the passive measurements will eventually reveal enough information about the system to discover its network strucutre, Vasu’s techique will detect when the passive measurements become informative enough to solve the problem and immediately reveal the answer.

Second, David Grimsman (MS) presented his paper entitled“A Case Study of a Systematic Attack Design Method for Critical Infrastructure Cyber-Physical Systems”(his presentation can be found here). This work reflected the efforts of the IDeA Labs cyber security team, includingVasu Chetty, Nathan Woodbury and collaborators Elham Vaziripour, Daniel Zappala, and Sandip Roy. This work demonstrates our ability to evaluate the systemic risk of large network systems applied to a water management system on the Sevier River in central Utah. In this project we use Dynamical Structure Function theory, developed at IDeA Labs, to discover the instrinsic vulnerabilities in a system. In this case, we found that although there are many places one could hack into the system, a particular cell phone ended up being a $70,000,000 device based on the damage one could do by attacking it.

Finally, Nathan Woodbury (Ph.D) participated in a special invited session “On NASDAQ Order Book Dynamics: New Problems for the Control Field” by presenting our work, in collaboration with Scott Condie, Bob Barmish, Jim Primbs, and Donatello Materassi modeling the market-making mechanisms in equity markets. The questions we are exploring include how the pending orders on book for a particular stock influence how the price of that stock will move in the future. Since orders can be placed at no cost, such sensitivies could provide mechanisms for market manipulation. His presentation can be found here.