Network Science: Models and Distributed Algorithms (18799 H/PH)
IST-CMU PhD Course
Fall 2016


Contact

Instructor: João Xavier
jxavier (@) isr.ist.utl.pt
http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~jxavier

TA: João Martins (joaoa ( @ ) andrew.cmu.edu)


Announcements


Course info

Description Multi-agent systems model the approaching networks of devices that sense, compute and communicate: the Internet of Things, wireless camera networks, smart grids, vehicular networks, teams of cooperative robots, computer networks for distributed machine learning.

Commonly, agents (say, a tiny sensor, a robot, or a computer) take local measurements and need to extract global information from the local datasets---finding a  target position from several range measurements in a team of robots, reconstructing the state of a cyber-physical system from  wireless sensor network readings, or learning a classifier from distributed datasets in Big Data applications.

To extract information from the local datasets, we need distributed processing: the centralized paradigm---a central node receives all local datasets and computes the global information---does not scale to the massive size of emergent systems.
In distributed processing, no central node exists; agents collaborate with neighbors to reproduce the centralized solution.

The PhD Network Science course covers the latest tools from the boiling field of distributed processing, both for static and dynamic networks.

Part 1: static networks
1. Background: graphs and Perron-Frobenius theory
2. Consensus with undirected and directed communications
3. Distributed optimization: convex and nonconvex methods
4. Distributed detection and estimation

Part 2: dynamic networks
1. Background: random matrix theory and martingales
2. Consensus with undirected and directed communications
3. Distributed optimization: convex and nonconvex methods
4. Distributed detection and estimation


Grading: 60% (homeworks) + 40% (24h take-home exam)


Lectures

1. Course overview
2. Consensus in static undirected networks
3. Consensus in static directed networks
4. Optimization in static undirected networks
5. Estimation in static undirected networks
6. Detection in static undirected networks (to appear)
7. Consensus in dynamic undirected networks (to appear)
8. Optimization in dynamic undirected networks (to appear)
 


Homeworks

Homework 1
Homework 2
Homework 3
Homework 4
Homework 5