Speakers
The following guests will be speaking at the symposium (listed in program order):
From Supervisory Control to Cyber Resilience
Feng Lin, Wayne State University
Feng Lin received his B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 1982, and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, from 1987 to 1988. Since 1988, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA, where he is currently a professor. His current research interests include discrete event systems, hybrid systems, robust control, and their applications in alternative energy, biomedical systems, and automotive control. He authored a book entitled “Robust Control Design: An Optimal Control Approach” and coauthored a paper that received a George Axelby outstanding paper award from the IEEE Control Systems Society. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
Scaling the Formal Synthesis of Supervisory Control Software
Richard Hill, University of Detroit Mercy
Richard C. Hill received the B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1998 and the M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. He then worked at Lockheed Martin Corporation on satellite attitude determination and control and spent time as a high school math and science teacher before earning the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and the M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2008. Since 2008, Dr. Hill has been on the faculty of University of Detroit Mercy where he is currently a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Assistant Dean for Research and External Initiatives in the College of Engineering & Science. His research focuses on scaling and optimizing supervisory control logic for complex discrete-event systems through modular and hierarchical techniques. Dr. Hill also has an interest in vehicle control applications, engineering education, and diversifying the STEM pipeline through his leadership of the iDRAW high school STEM pathways program.
The Solution of Planning Problems using Supervisory Control Theory
Patrícia Pena, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Patrícia Pena received the B.S. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering, in 2007, from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, under the supervision of Prof. José Cury. During the Ph.D., she spent a year at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005/2006), under Prof. Stéphane Lafortune’s supervision. In June 2008, she became a tenured professor at the Electronics Engineering Department at UFMG. She is a co developer of UltraDES, an open source library for modeling, analysis and control of Discrete Event Systems. Her research interests include discrete-event systems, supervisory control, optimization and their applications to robotics, manufacturing systems and cyber-security.
On Robustness of Cyber-Physical Systems
Rômulo Meira-Góes, The Pennsylvania State University
Rômulo Meira-Góes is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Penn State. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher working with Eunsuk Kang, Stavros Tripakis, and Stéphane Lafortune. In 2022, he received the inaugural Cyber-Physical Systems rising stars award from the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020, working with Stéphane Lafortune. Prior to the University of Michigan, he earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná – Curitiba in 2015.
Secure-by-construction synthesis of cyber-physical systems
Xiang Yin, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Xiang Yin was born in Anhui, China, in 1991. He received the B.Eng degree from Zhejiang University in 2012, the M.S. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2013, and the Ph.D degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2017, all in electrical engineering. Since 2017, he has been with the Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he is an Associate Professor. His research interests include formal methods, discrete-event systems and cyber-physical systems. Dr. Yin is serving as the chair of the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems, an Associate Editor for the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory & Applications, and a member of the IEEE CSS Conference Editorial Board. Dr. Yin received the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Best Student Paper Award Finalist in 2016.
Robustness of Computer Systems: A Formal Methods Perspective
Eunsuk Kang, Carnegie Mellon University
Eunsuk Kang is an Assistant Professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include software engineering and formal methods, with applications to system safety and security. He is especially interested in leveraging formal modeling techniques, design methodologies, and automated verification to construct safe and secure software and cyber-physical systems (CPS). He has applied his work to a diverse range of systems, including intelligent vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), medical devices, water treatment plants, and mobile applications. He is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award and three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. He received his PhD in Computer Science at MIT and a Bachelor of Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Secrecy and Security in Discrete-Event Systems
Karen Rudie, Queen’s University
Karen Rudie received her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Toronto, in the Systems Control Group. In 1992–93 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, Minnesota. Since 1993 she has been at Queen’s University (Canada) where she is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a member of Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, and a cross-appointed professor in the School of Computing. From 2004–06 she was an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. She has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (since 2000), where she is currently a Department Editor, and has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (2015-2020), IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (1996–99), and IEEE Control Systems Magazine (2003). She is a Fellow of the IEEE. Her research focuses on the control and security of discrete-event systems.
Back to the Future: From SupCon to Privacy
Kurt Rohloff, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
Dr. Kurt Rohloff is the Co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies. He has been leading the development and application of practical privacy technologies. He is the co-founder of the OpenFHE open-source library and co-founder of the HomomorphicEncryption.org industry consortium for privacy technologies. He has led technology development teams funded by NIH, DARPA and IARPA to develop and apply homomorphic encryption. He has been awarded a DARPA Director’s Fellowship and other recognition for his work on privacy technologies. He received his undergrad degree from Georgia Tech and his MS and PhD from the Univ. of Michigan. He was a senior scientist at BBN Technologies and is taking a leave-of-absence from NJIT where he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science.
Balancing Privacy and Utility in Networked Systems
Andrew Wintenberg, University of Michigan
Andrew Wintenberg is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, co-advised by Stephane Lafortune and Necmiye Ozay. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, in 2018 and his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020. His research interests include verifying and enforcing the privacy and security of discrete event and hybrid systems with formal methods.
International Conflict in the Information Age
Isaac Porche, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Dr. Isaac Porche is the National Security Analysis mission area executive at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. Prior to joining APL, he worked at the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State University, where he served as deputy director and head of the Communications, Information and Navigation Office. Porche was responsible for setting a vision and providing oversight of more than 300 research scientists, engineers and technicians working on a $100 million sponsor-funded research-and-development portfolio.
Previous positions include employment as a research scientist and chief engineer at General Dynamics Missions Systems and lecturer for the Carnegie Mellon University Institute of Politics and Strategy. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed reports, conference papers, op-eds and high-level presentations and publications, including congressional testimony in 2016 and his 2019 textbook, “Cyberwarfare: An Introduction to Information-Age Conflict.”Porche holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan (1998), a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Southern University and A&M College – Baton Rouge.
An Overview of Catastrophe Modeling and Cyber Insurance
Eric Dallal, Arch
Eric Dallal completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2014. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles for the next two years before taking a position at AIR in Boston, working in the field of catastrophe modeling. He spent the next six years creating models of various cyber events for the insurance industry. Eric is now VP of Cyber Catastrophe Analytics at Arch.
From Discrete Event Systems to Event Driven Systems
Christos Cassandras, Boston University
Christos G. Cassandras is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received a B.S. degree from Yale University, M.S.E.E from Stanford University, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published 500 refereed papers in these areas, and 7 books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. He has most recently collaborated with MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents.
Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He is currently an Editor of Automatica. He was the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS). He has also served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS, as well as on several IEEE committees, and has chaired several conferences. He has been a plenary/keynote speaker at numerous international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001, the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002 and 2016, and the 20th IFAC World Congress in 2017 and has also been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.
He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize and a 2014 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition (for a “Smart Parking” system and for the analytical engine of the Street Bump system respectively), the 2014 Engineering Distinguished Scholar Award at Boston University, several honorary professorships, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC and holds a Chair Professorship at the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University.
Interactive Computer Aided Design of Energy Efficient Metro Tunnel Trajectories
Michael Polis, Oakland University
Michael P. Polis received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida in 1966, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, in 1968, and 1972 respectively. From 1972-1983 he was a faculty member in Electrical Engineering, at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. From 19831987 he directed the Systems Theory and Operations Research Program at NSF. In 1987 he joined Wayne State University as Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 1993-2001 he was Dean of Engineering and Computer Science, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, where he is currently Professor Emeritus the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He has been a consultant for several companies, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. His research interests are in energy and transportation systems, the identification, and control of distributed parameter systems, and hybrid systems. He co-authored the paper named the “Best Paper IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 1974-1975”.
Safety Standardization for Driving Automation Systems
Rami Debouk, General Motors Research
Rami Debouk joined General Motors Global Research and Development Center (GM R&D) in Warren,
Michigan, USA in 2000 after receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently the System Safety Technical Fellow at GM R&D with
research interests in system safety methods and techniques, system of systems, failure diagnosis, and
fault tolerant systems.
Rami represents the US as a Technical Expert in the development of safety standards within the
International Standardization Organization (ISO) and Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). He is the
current chair of the United States Technical Advisory Group for ISO TC22/SC32/WG13 (Safety for Driving
Automation Systems). Rami received the 2014 SAE / InterRegs Standards and Regulations Award for his
involvement in developing and implementing safety processes and standards since 2001 and was named
the International System Safety Society (ISSS) Engineer of the year in 2009.
Rami has delivered many keynote speeches in the area of system safety, published more than 40
referred technical papers and holds 12 patents and 8 GM trade secrets. He is a Fellow of both SAE and
ISSS and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
New Air Transport
Raja Sengupta, University of California, Berkeley
Raja Sengupta is Professor in the Systems Engineering Program, Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He holds a Systems Phd from the University of Michigan. His research spans automated & connected cars, advanced air mobility, digital asset management, public health, wireless networking, and control theory. Professor Sengupta collaborates with government and industry for impact. He has been an advisor to the World Bank and NATO, recipient of USDOT’s Connected Vehicle Technology award, UC Berkeley’s Energy and Climate Lectures Innovation Award, and has authored over a hundred papers spanning control theory, networking, advanced air mobility, and transportation. He holds car-to-road networking patents with Toyota, a UAV patent with BAE Aerospace, and has car-to-car networking contributions standardized by the SAE into J2945. He created technology for the successful start-ups automatic.com, founded Responsible Robotics, and served as Principal Investigator for NASA, DoD, NSF, Caltrans, and several blue chip companies.
Modeling, Control, and Optimization of Resource Allocation Systems: From Concurrent Software to Aviation
Hongwei Liao, Amazon
Hongwei Liao received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering-systems in 2009 and 2012, respectively, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he also received the M.S.E. degree in industrial and operations engineering in 2011. He received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering and the Dual B.Mgt. degree in business administration (Hons.) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, both in 2007. He is currently a Principal Research Scientist at Amazon, focusing on planning and optimization problems of air transportation network. Prior to Amazon, he worked on the research staff at Netflix, Boeing, GE Research, and American Airlines.
Sense-And-Avoid Standards for UAV Operations in Civil Airspace
Yi-Liang Chen, Northrup Grumman Corporation
Yi-Liang Chen received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University (1991), M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan (1994, 1997), and M.S in Cybersecurity from New York University (2016). He was a Senior Scientist with Rockwell Science Center/ Teledyne Scientific where he conducted research on autonomous unmanned aerial/ground systems (UAS/UGS) and collaborative behaviors. Since joining Northrop Grumman in 2008, he has been leading research and development in autonomous UAS and sense-and-avoid (SAA) technology, and serving as Northrop Grumman’s lead technical representative to SAA related industry standards committees. Yi-Liang is currently leading a diverse system engineering team to support research, development, production, and operation of a POR UAS program. He is also a member of the IEEE CSS Technology Conferences Editorial Board.
A Journey Through Deep Reinforcement Learning: From Robotics to Large Language Models
Sahika Genc, Amazon
From Diagnosability to Social Responsibility
Meera Sampath, Binghamton University
Meera Sampath is Associate Dean of Research at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and
Applied Science, Binghamton University, NY, USA. She joined Binghamton University from the State
University of New York, System, where she was Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Executive
Director of the SUNY-IBM AI Research Alliance. Prior to that Meera spent over 20 years at Xerox Corp.
where she held several research and senior technical leadership positions including Principal Scientist,
Vice President of Innovation, and Founding Director of Xerox Research Center India, the company’s first
research center in Asia.
Meera received her B.E., M.Tech. and PhD, all in Electrical Engineering, from Anna University, the Indian
Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and the University of Michigan respectively. Her research on fault
diagnosis in discrete event systems earned her the University’s Distinguished Dissertation Award and
the ECE Distinguished Achievement Award. She is also a Barbour Scholar and an ECE Alumni Merit
Award winner. She 15 US patents in control, fault diagnosis, high availability printing systems,
distributed document processing and video analytics.
Meera’s current research interests are in social implications of technology and socially responsible
automation.
Control and Games on Networks
Peter E. Caines, McGill University, Montreal
Peter E. Caines received the BA in mathematics from Oxford University in 1967 and the PhD in systems and control theory in 1970 from Imperial College, University of London, supervised by David Q. Mayne, FRS. Following PDF and visiting positions he joined McGill University in 1980, where he is Distinguished James McGill Professor and Macdonald Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the IEEE Control Systems Society Bode Lecture Prize (2009), is a Fellow of IFAC, CIFAR, SIAM, IEEE, the IMA (UK) and the Royal Society of Canada (2003), and a member of Professional Engineers Ontario. His monograph, Linear Stochastic Systems (Wiley, 1988), is now a SIAM Classic and his research interests include stochastic and hybrid systems, and mean field (games and control) systems on complex networks.
From Discrete Event Systems to Global Internet
Enke Chen, Palo Alto Networks
Enke Chen joined Palo Alto Networks (Santa Clara, CA) in Sept. 2020 as a Senior Distinguished Engineer, and has been working on the architecture and design of advanced networking and secure access solutions.
Enke is a well-known expert in routing protocol design and implementation, in particular on BGP and MPLS L3VPN. He has authored and implemented a number of RFC’s and patents, and quite a few of them are deployed widely in the Internet. Enke also has extensive experience in networking system architecture, design, and implementation, with emphasis on the control-plane robustness, scalability, and modularity.
Enke started his career as a network engineer at Merit Networks (Ann Arbor, MI) working on the design and engineering of the NSFNET backbone, and then at MCI (Reston, VA) on the Internet-MCI backbone, including routing architecture, traffic engineering and inter-provider peering. He then joined Cisco Systems (San Jose, CA) as a software engineer and became a primary developer for BGP in IOS. He designed and implemented a number of BGP features widely deployed by service providers. He continued his career as a Principal Engineer at Redback Networks (San Jose, CA) for five years, and led the development of several large routing modules on the SmartEdge platform, including BGP, LDP, MPLS L3VPN, and implemented a number of infrastructure libraries and modules.
Enke then re-joined Cisco and worked for 16+ years as a Principal Engineer and then a Distinguished Engineer. His work spanned over multiple large and impactful projects, included modernizing the enterprise network operating system, service provider routing protocol development and implementation, and the Viptela SDWAN integration with the routing portfolio.
Enke holds a Ph.D. and a M.S.E in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and a Bachelor of Engineering in Automation from Tsinghua University, China.