EE Systems Seminar

Abstract        Many social and technological networks can be modeled as stochastic networks. An abrupt change in the behavior in a cluster of agents in the network often translates into a change in the stochastic model of the network. The quickest event detection problem refers to detecting abrupt changes in a network with minimal delay after the changes occur, as well as localizing the cluster of the changes that have undergone changes. Measurements from the network are acquired sequentially until a reliable decision about a change can be formed. When a cluster undergoes a change, the traces of the change appears in the measurements from different agents in varying degrees. In this talk we will discuss an active sensing mechanism that can rapidly focus the sensing resources such that change points as well as the cluster undergone a change can be identified with the fewest number of measurements from the network.

Bio                Ali Tajer is an Assistant Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. During 2007-2010 he was with Columbia University where he received the M.A degree in Statistics and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering, and during 2010-2012 he was with Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. His research interests include mathematical statistics and network information theory, with applications in power systems analysis. He serves as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. In the past he has also served as the Guest Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He is a senior member of the IEEE and received an NSF CAREER award in 2016.