Message of the Coordinators
The next two months bring us several activities of DYSCO.
We have three graduate school courses scheduled : "Statistical Machine Learning" in February in LLN, "Inverse Problems and Environment" in March in Namur and "Low-rank approximation and its applications" in Leuven in March as well. You can find out about these courses on the SOCN Graduate School web site.
The Benelux Meeting in Systems and Control, to be held from March 25 to 27 in Heijen, has already been announced, and we remind you below about the Study day on Control of Traffic Networks organized by the SYSTeMS Research Group, Universiteit Gent that is held this week on February 4th.
If you haven't done so yet, we encourage you to sign up for participating in these events.
Vincent Blondel and Paul Van Dooren
DYSCO coordinators
Newsletter subscription
The newsletter Dysco News is the monthly newsletter of the Belgian Interuniversity Attraction Pole "Dynamical systems, control and optimization" (DYSCO) funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office. The DYSCO network includes partners at UCL, KUL, UGent, VUB, ULg, UMons, UNamur, and international partners at Stanford, Princeton and MIT. Isystems, control and optimization. Subscription is free and open to anyone: subscribe here, or unsubscribe.
Staff Movements and Visitors
UCL
Staff
- François Gonze, PhD student, February 2014, supervisor Raphaël Jungers.
Visitors
- Chloe Brun (Oxford Internet Institute), January 27-31, 2014. Host : Vincent Blondel.
- Ann Samoilenko (Oxford Internet Institute), February 17-19, 2014. Host : Vincent Blondel.
- Paolo Mason (Supelec), February 10 - March 21, 2014. Host : Raphaël Jungers.
- Guillaume Obozinski (Ecole des Ponts, ParisTech), February 10-21, 2014.
KUL
Staff
- Paul Smyth, postdoc, February 1, 2014, promotor : Sabine Van Huffel.
Visitors
- Enrique Maranon Reyes and Carlos Vazquez Seisdedos (Cuba), from January 31 to March 2, 2014, host : Sabine Van Huffel.
UGent
- Màrcio Diniz who has been working since February of last year collaborating with professor Gert de Cooman left SYSTeMS Research Group to pick up his position as assistant professor at the Department of Statistics of the Federal University of S. Carlos, Brazil.
- Lode Wylleman and La Duc Viet left SYSTEMS Group.
VUB
Staff
- Julian Stoev, post-doc.
- Georgios Birpoutsoukis, PhD student.
Visitors
- Sandor Kolumban, Budapest University of Technology : from 27/01/2014 until 24/03/2014.
- Miroslav Zivanovic, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain : from 10/02/2014 until 21/02/2014.
UNamur
Visitors
- Bruno Gonçalves, Maître de Conférences, Centre Physique Théorique, Université Aix-Marseille, France (24-28 February 2014)
- Daniel Ruiz, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (ENSEEIHT-IRIT), Toulouse, France (18-21 February 2014)
- Taro Takaguchi, Department of Mathematical Informatics, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan (2-22 February 2014)
Seminars
KUL
- February 18, 2014 - 15:00-16:30 in Thermotechnical Institute, Auditorium van de 2de hoofdwet
28th Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering : Philip E. Gill, Professor of Mathematics at UCSD Center for Computational Mathematics and Senior Fellow San Diego Supercomputer Center.
VUB
ELEC Seminars take place at the department ELEC (Pleinlaan 2, Building K, 7th floor) every two weeks, normally on Thursdays in the morning. The final time and date are announced at least one week before a seminar at https://intranet.vub.ac.be/doctoral-schools/nse/team-seminars/elec-seminars/.
- February 20, 2014 : seminar of Lieven De Lathauwer (KULeuven) at the dept. ELEC (14:00 – 15:00).
ULg
Systmod weekly seminars normally take place on each Friday, 11am. They are announced on this webpage.
UNamur
Unless otherwise stated, naXys weekly seminars take place on each Tuesday, 1pm, in the Salle de Conférence (room E25), Department of Mathematics, 2nd floor of the Faculté des Sciences Economiques, Sociales et de Gestion building, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur. They are announced on this webpage.
The seminars that are currently scheduled for February 2014 are listed below:
- February 18, 2014, 1 pm, Floriana Gargiulo (naXys, University of Namur), Driving forces in researchers mobility.
- February 25, 2014, 1 pm, Bruno Gonçalves (Centre Physique Théorique, Université Aix-Marseille), Big Data for the Study of Human Mobility and Behavior.
Thesis defenses
UCL
- Nicolas Boumal, Optimization and estimation on manifolds, supervisors : P-A Absil and V. Blondel. February 14, 2014 at 15:30, auditoire BARB 93, place Sainte-Barbe, 1, 1348 LLN.
UGent
- Nicolae-Emanuel Marinica, Distributed estimation and control of interacting hybrid systems for traffic applications, supervisors : René Boel and Alain Sarlette. The defense takes place on February 5th, 2014, in the Jozef Plateauzaal of the faculty Ingenieurswetenschappen en Architectuur, Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Gent.
UNamur
- Audrey Compère, Stabilité des astéroïdes multiples, auditorium E12 (first floor of the Faculté des Sciences Economiques, Sociales et de Gestion building, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur). Wednesday 5 March 2014, 3:30 pm.
Graduate School in Systems, Optimization, Control and Networks
The SOCN Graduate School 2013-2014 programme is available here : http://sites.uclouvain.be/socn/
The next course is entitled Low-rank approximation and its applications. It will be given by Ivan MARKOVSKY (VUB) on March 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 2014 (9:00-12:00) at K.U.Leuven (Room 00.62, ESAT, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Heverlee-Leuven)
More information about this course : http://sites.uclouvain.be/socn/Courses/Courses2013-4
On-line registrations are welcome via this form.
Study Days, Workshops and Summer Schools
Study day on Control of Traffic Networks : UGent, February 4, 2014
You are kindly invited to attend the Study day on Control of Traffic Networks organized by the SYSTeMS Research Group, Universiteit Gent.
This study day takes place on Tuesday afternoon February 4th, 2014 in the SYSTeMS lecture room, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 914 (2nd floor), 9052 Gent-Zwijnaarde
The preliminary programme of the study day is as follows:
14h00: welcome
14h15: Noortje Groot: Reverse Stackelberg Games: Theory and Applications in Traffic Control
15h00: Jan van Schuppen: Coordinated-distributed prediction of traffic flow in a motorway network
15h45: coffee and tea
16h15: René Boel: Urban traffic control: a case study of coordination control for networks of systems
17h00: final discussion
For further information please contact the organizers : René Boel (rene.boel@ugent.be, 09-2645648) or Alain Sarlette (alain.sarlette@ugent.be, 09-2645658).
Lectures on Data Collection and on Data Analysis and Visualization
In the framework of the course "Multi-disciplinary project for enterprise (SMATM203)" of the Master program of Mathematics, the students will benefit of 30 hours of lectures delivered by Bruno Gonçalves, UMarseille, (Mon 24/2- Fri 28/2, 10h00-12h00, 5 lectures on "data collection") and Anastasios Noulas, Cambridge (Mon 17/3 - Fri 28/3, 10h00-12h00, 10 lectures on "data analysis and visualization"). Some short modules of 2 up to 10 hours will complete the students' formation.
The project itself (which is shortly described below) and the short modules are intended only for Master students in Mathematics of the University of Namur. However the lectures are open to everybody who is interested. Please contact Timoteo Carletti <timoteo.carletti@unamur.be> for more detail if necessary. The lectures will take place in the Salle de Conférence (room E25), Department of Mathematics, 2nd floor of the Faculté des Sciences Economiques, Sociales et de Gestion building, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur.
Project: People move since ever, for work, for hobby, for socio-economics reasons, etc. They move at different frequencies - daily, weekly, yearly - and across different distances (intra-cities, between cities, between countries). Study human mobility has been and still it is a main research field for the implications it can have on disease spreading, socio-economics issues, information diffusion, etc. After a first phase lasting for many years, where data were collected mainly using surveys and direct interviews, the advent of the technology introduced, as a byproduct, the possibility to track easily people displacements, for instance any financial transaction you do, any ticket you buy, any use of your credit card, etc are registerd somewhere. Nowadays internet and the improved connectivity of everyone (smart phones, tablets, portables, etc) through (social) apps, improved even more the amount of data available. We are now thus able to follow people during their everyday activities, recording visited locations and time stamps.
Goals: Using data from foursquare (https://foursquare.com/), students would determine the most common "chain of activities" and compare them with other available ones, for instance the ones obtained by the GRT-naXys group in the framework of human mobility in Belgium. Moreover students should be able to create a ?simple? prediction model allowing them to forecast the next check-in from the knowledge of the present one (Markov case) and also of the previous one (memory case).
FNRS Graduate Schools MATH and COMPLEX : Inverse problems and environment : some new tools for atmospheric studies
Dates : March 10-12, 2014
Place: University of Namur/
More info: http://www.graduatecollegescience.be/detail.php?lang=en&id=evt_668
Local organizers: Joseph Winkin and Timoteo Carletti
Scientific coordinator: Emmanuel Witrant
Keynote speakers: Anne De Wit, Sander Houweling, Maarten Krol, Franck Pattyn, Annick Sartenaer, Stefan Vandewalle, Emmanuel Witrant.
Global warming is now unequivocal, as mentionned in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (November 2013). This climate change can be monitored and analyzed, for example, by understanding the warming of the atmosphere and the recent evolution of greenhouse gas.
The complexity of the dynamics and the sparsity of the measurements (e.g. direct measurements of the atmosphere or trace gas measurements in ice cores) necessitate advanced methods to reconstruct the past events. The aim of this school is to introduce recent modeling and inverse techniques for solving such key environmental problems with high societal impact. It will emphasize the need for an interdisciplinary approach involving environmental science, optimization, numerical analysis and signal processing. The classes are intended for a broad audience with basic mathematical background (e.g. calculus and differential equations).
Vacancies
Research associates at INRA (Montpellier, France)
Area : Dynamical systems and simulation of micro-organisms based ecosystems
See the vacancy description here.
Papers produced by the IAP Network
UCL
N. Ha Hoang, Denis Dochain, Françoise Couenne and Yann Le Gorrec, Dissipative pseudo Hamiltonian realization of irreversible processes. Submitted to Systems & Control Letters, 2014.
N. Ha Hoang, Denis Dochain and B. Erik Ydstie, Partial inventory control of the CSTR via reaction-dependent generalized inventories. Submitted to the IFAC World Congress 2014.
N. Ha Hoang, Denis Dochain and Nicolas Hudon, A thermodynamic approach towards Lyapunov based control of reaction rate. Submitted to the IFAC World Congress 2014.
Luke B. Winternitz, André L. Tits, P.-A. Absil, Addressing rank degeneracy in constraint-reduced interior-point methods for linear optimization, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, January 2014, Volume 160, Issue 1, pp 127-157
Moreno, Jaime A.; Dochain, Denis. Finite Time Converging Input Observers for Nonlinear Second-order Systems. CDC 2013 (Florence, Italy, 10/12/2013 - 13/12/2013). In: Proceedings of the 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2013, 978-1-4673-5716-6, p. 3554-3559. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/136739
Hudon, Nicolas; Guay, Martin; Dochain, Denis. Stability and Feedback Stabilization for a Class of Mixed Potential Systems. CDC 2013 (Florence, Italy, 10/12/2013 - 13/12/2013). In: Proceedings of the 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2013, 978-1-4673-5716-6, p. 4601-4606. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/136743
Mouret, Jean-Roch; David, Robert; Zamorano, Francisca; Vande Wouwer, Alain; Dochain, Denis; Sablayrolles, Jean-Marie. Closed carbon balance in calculation of metabolic fluxes – Application to the central metabolism of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in wine-making fermentation. IFAC CAB 2013 (Mumbai, India, 16/12/2013 - 18/12/2013). In: Proceedings of the 12th IFAC Symposium on Computer Applications in Biotechnology, 2013, p. 125-130. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/136798
Hoang, Ngoc Ha; Dochain, Denis. Entropy-based stabilizing feedback law under input constraints of a CSTR. IFAC DYCOPS 2013 (Mumbai, India, 18/12/2013 - 20/12/2013). In: Proceedings of the 10th IFAC Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Process Systems, 2013, 978-3-902661-69-2, p. 27-32. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/136756
M. S. P. Subathra, S. Easter Selvan, T. Aruldoss Albert Victoire, A. Hepzibah Christinal, and Umberto Amato, A hybrid with cross-entropy method and sequential quadratic programming to solve economic load dispatch problem, accepted for publication in IEEE Systems Journal, 2014.
KUL
Hunyadi B., Camps D., Sorber L., Van Paesschen W., De Vos M., Van Huffel S., De Lathauwer L., Block term decomposition for modelling epileptic seizures, Internal Report 14-04, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014.
Spoelstra H., Stoyanov S., Burgoyne L., Bennet D., Sweeney C., Drachsler H., Vanderperren K., Van Huffel S., McSweeney J., Shorten G., O'Flynn S., Cantillon-Murphy P., O'Tuathaigh C., Convergence and translation : attitudes to inter-professional learning and teaching of creative problem-solving among medical and engineering students and staff, Internal Report 14-06, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014. Accepted for publication in BMC Medical Education.
Mehrkanoon S., Suykens J.A.K, Large scale semi-supervised learning using KSC based model, Internal Report 14-07, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014.
Mosconi E., Sima D., Marzola P., Fontanella M., Osorio M., Van Huffel S., Different quantification algorithms may lead to different results : a comparison using proton MRS lipid signals, Internal Report 14-14, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014. Accepted for publication in NMR Biomedicine.
N.S. Abo-Ghander, F. Logist, J.R. Grace, J.F.M. Van Impe, S.S.E.H. Elnashaie and C. Jim Lim, Heterogeneous Modeling of a Membrane Reactor Coupling Dehydrogenation of Ethylbenzene with Hydrogenation of Nitrobenzene Chemical Engineering and Processing, Accepted for publication, 2014.
D. Telen, F. Logist, R. Quirynen, B. Houska, M. Diehl and J. Van Impe, Optimal experiment design for nonlinear dynamic (bio)chemical systems using sequential semidefinite programming, AIChE Journal, Accepted for publication, 2014.
D. Vercammen, F. Logist, J. Van Impe, Estimation of Specific Fluxes in Metabolic Networks using Non-linear Dynamic Optimization, Escape 24, Budapest (Hungary), June 15-18, 2014, Accepted for publication.
M. Vallerio, D. Claessens, F. Logist and J. Van Impe, Multi-objective and robust optimal control of a CVD reactor for polysilicon production, ESCAPE 2014, Budapest, Hungary, June 15-18, 2014, Accepted for publication.
D. Telen, I. Stamati, M. da Silva, F. Logist, J. Van Impe, Optimal experiment design for model discrimination of nonlinear biochemical systems using the sigma point method, Escape 24, Budapest (Hungary), June 15-18, 2014, Accepted for publication.
H.H. Pham, N. Lambert, P. Buffel, K. Van Eyck, R. Van den Broeck, R. Dewil and I. Smets, Simulating ultrasonic activated sludge disintegration for excess sludge reduction, Preprints of the 12th IFAC Symposium on Computer Applications in Biotechnology : 12-17. The International Federation of Automatic Control, Mumbai (India), December 16-18, 2013.
VUB
De Caigny, J., R. Pintelon, J. F. Camino, J. Swevers, Interpolated modeling of LPV systems, IEEE Trans. on Control Systems Technology, accepted for publication.
UGent
P. Rouchon and A. Sarlette, Contraction and stability analysis of steady-states for open quantum systems described by Lindblad differential equations, 52nd IEEE Conf. on Decision & Control, Firenze / Italy, pp. 1259-1264 (2013)
Ram A. Somaraju, A. Sarlette and H. Thienpont, Quantum ?ltering using POVM measurements, 52nd IEEE Conf. on Decision & Control, Firenze / Italy, pp. 1259-1264 (2013)
L. Mazzarella, A. Sarlette and F. Ticozzi, A new perspective on gossip iterations: from symmetrization to quantum consensus, 52nd IEEE Conf. on Decision & Control, Firenze / Italy, pp. 250-255 (2013)
N.E. Marinica, A. Sarlette and R.K. Boel, Distributed particle filter for urban traffic networks using a platoon based model, IEEE Trans.Intell.Transp.Systems vol. 14 nr. 4, pp. 1918-1929 (2013)
UNamur
Aldashev, G. , Aldashev, S. & Carletti, T., On Convergence in the Spatial AK Growth Models, naXys Technical Report Series, vol. 3, 2014.
Cianci, C. & Carletti, T., Stochastic patterns in a 1D Rock-Paper-Scissor model with mutation, naXys Technical Report Series, vol. 1, 2014.
Renaud Lambiotte, Vsevolod Salnikov and Martin Rosvall, Effect of memory on the dynamics of random walks on networks, submitted.
IAP Contact Persons
| UCL | Isabelle Hisette |
| KUL | Ida Tassens |
| UGent | Margot Roels |
| VUB | Ann Pintelon |
| ULg | Sophie Cimino |
| UMons | Laurent Dewasme |
| UNamur | Joseph Winkin |