Speaker: Guodong Shi (The Australian National University)

Time and Venue: Sep.30,10:00-11:00,N514

Abstract: In this talk, I will report and discuss a few continuous-time flows that solve linear equations over a network without a central decision maker. We first investigate a class of first order gradient flows in the spirit of alternating projections, whose original idea can be traced back to the work of von Neumann in the 1940s. We next show the well-known Arrow’s flow for constraint optimization can be used to produce a second order network flow, being able to compute the exact least squares solutions of the linear equation under quite general network conditions. These results are joint work with Yang Liu and Brian Anderson at Australian National University, and Christian Lageman and Uwe Helmke from University of Wurzburg, Germany.

Bio: Guodong Shi received his B.Sc. degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from School of Mathematics, Shandong University, Jinan, China, in July 2005, and his Ph.D. in Systems Theory from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in July 2010, respectively. From Aug. 2010 to Apr. 2014 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the ACCESS Linnaeus Centre, School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He held a visiting position from Oct. 2013 to Dec. 2013 at the School of Information and Engineering Technology, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. Since May 2014 he has been with the Research School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, as a Lecturer and Future Engineering Research Leadership Fellow. His current research interests include distributed control systems, quantum networking and decisions, and social opinion dynamics.