Seminars

Distributed energy resources (DERs), including distributed generation, storage, and demand response, are expanding and decentralizing options for the provision of electricity services. These novel resources compete with one another as well as conventional generation resources and network assets to provide a limited range of important electricity services. Distributed resources derive much of their comparative advantage from the ability to be located in areas of the electrical grid that maximize the “locational value” delivered by these resources. Locational value…

Technology scaling of DRAM cells has enabled higher capacity memory for the last few decades. Unfortunately, DRAM cells become vulnerable to failure as they scale down to a smaller size. Enabling high-performance, energy-efficient, scalable memory systems without sacrificing the reliability is a major research challenge. My work focuses on designing a scalable memory system by rethinking the traditional assumptions in abstraction and separation of responsibilities across system layers. 

In this talk, I will discuss three fundamental ways to enable DRAM scaling. First, we can enable…

The collection of massive observational datasets has led to unprecedented opportunities for causal inference, such as using electronic health records to identify risk factors for disease. However, our ability to understand these complex data sets has not grown the same pace as our ability to collect them. Instead causal inference has mainly focused on identifying pairwise relationships between variables. However, when the inference output is a large network of relationships, it can be difficult for non-experts to make sense of, and can lead to ineffective actions. This talk discusses…

Hybridization methods enable the analysis of hybrid automata with complex, nonlinear dynamics through a sound abstraction process. Complex dynamics are converted to simpler ones with added noise, and then analysis is done using a reachability method for the simpler dynamics. Several such recent approaches advocate that only “dynamic” hybridization techniques—i.e., those where the dynamics are abstracted on-the-fly during a reachability computation— are effective. In this talk, we demonstrate this is not the case, and create static hybridization methods that are more scalable than earlier…

For the first time, we have more people living in urban cities than rural areas. Based on this inevitable urbanization, my research aims to address sustainability challenges related to urban mobility (e.g., energy consumption and traffic congestion) with data-driven Cyber-Physical-Systems), which is a new information paradigm integrating communication, computation, and control in real time. Under the context of a smart cities initiative proposed by the White House, in this talk, I will focus on CPS related to large-scale cross-domain urban systems, e.g., taxi, bus, subway, cellphone and…