Announcements

Colloquium on Digital Transformation Science

• 
  

  September 30October 7, 3 pm CT Challenges & Opportunities in Cloud Operations Research Hierarchical Control for Cyber-Physical Systems and Applications to Traffic Management Murat Arcak, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences,  University of California, BerkeleyIshai Menache, Senior Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research REGISTER FOR ZOOM WEBINAR Cloud computing is a multi-billion-dollar business that has revolutionized the way computing resources are consumed. The emergence of cloud computing is attributed to lowering the risks for end-users (e.g., scaling-out resource usage based on demand), while allowing providers to reduce costs by managing compute resources at scale. In this talk, we will provide an overview of some of the challenges faced by providers at different dimensions of cloud operations. We will highlight the role of operations research and algorithms in increasing efficiency and return on investment of cloud infrastructure. As a concrete example, we zoom in on the Virtual Machine (VM) allocation problem, one of the fundamental problems in this area. VMs need to be assigned to physical machines in a way that reduces fragmentation and efficiently utilizes available machines. Motivated by advances in machine learning that provide good estimates of workload characteristics, we consider the effect of having extra information in the form of VM lifetimes and future demand. We show that even basic information about demand (e.g., its average) leads to algorithms with significantly better guarantees. Control of vehicle traffic management cyber-physical systems is invariably organized in a hierarchical structure that consists of multiple layers of feedback such as network, road link, and vehicle control. Using traffic management as a running example, this talk will present an integrated approach to designing these layers, thereby enabling a rigorous framework to provide system-level guarantees for the whole control stack. An example of this approach is symbolic control, which generates supervisory control actions to fulfill complex requirements expressed in temporal logic. In traffic management, symbolic control enables us to depart from steady state signal timing plans, and to develop reactive signaling schemes by first expressing finite horizon goals, such as dissipating queues and avoiding saturation, in temporal logic. Moving up to the network layer, we will next present a game theoretic analysis for routing, which takes into account the nonequilibrium dynamics resulting from the drivers’ continual revisions of their routes. We will introduce tools to deal with such dynamics and illustrate them on mixed-autonomy traffic. Murat Arcak, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley,  received his PhD degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a Fellow of IEEE and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)Ishai Menache received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Ishai has been with Microsoft Research since 2011, where he is the founder and manager of the Cloud Operations Research (CORE) group. His research focuses on developing large-scale optimization frameworks for cloud systems and applications. More broadly, his areas of interest include systems and networking, optimization, and machine learning.

  
  

Quick Links:

C3.ai DTI Webpage

Events

Information on Call for Proposals

Proposal Matchmaking

C3.ai DTI Training Materials

C3 Administration (password protected)

Have Questions? Please contact one of us:

• Jay Roloff, jayr@illinois.edu (Executive Director, c3.ai.DTI)
• R. Srikant, rsrikant@illinois.edu (Co-Director, c3.ai.DTI)
• Tandy Warnow, warnow@illinois.edu (Co-chief Scientist, c3.ai.DTI)