Special Seminar in Computing + Mathematical Sciences

The trends set by the Internet of Things (IoT) are pushing us to understand the interactions between communication, computation and control in systems. This talk will discuss simple models that can provide insights on the "informational" limits on control of high-performance systems with uncertain system parameters that are difficult to track.

The talk will develop a novel notion of "control capacity," as the fundamental limit on the ability of a noisy actuator to control a system. Control capacity builds on the traditional notion of communication capacity in information theory. The models considered involve multiplicative noise on the control signals, and the notion of control capacity can be thought of as partially generalizing the traditional uncertainty threshold principle from control.