Message of the Coordinators

Our yearly report, which was just turned in to BELSPO, says we had a very productive year. We want to thank you all for your contributions in making this happen and we wish you all a very pleasant and fruitful vacation.

But summer break is also the time for conferences and workshops and several activities organized by our members are announced in this newsletter.

Enjoy your summer !

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

• Visitors
  • Mauricio Barahona (Imperial College, London) will visit us on July 23.
  • Kyle Gallivan Florida State University) will stay with us from 13 to 15 July. He will work with Paul Van Dooren.

KUL

• Staff
  • Gorana Nikolic : PhD, Supervisor Bart De Moor, 01/08/2014
• Visitors
  • Ricardo Nanculef (host Johan Suykens), 09/07/2014-30/07/2014
  • Shuning Wang (host Johan Suykens), 01/07/2014-01/08/2014
  • Dexian Huang (host Johan Suykens), 01/07/2014-01/08/2014
  • Jing Wang (host Johan Suykens), 01/07/2014-01/08/2014
  • Hao Ye (host Johan Suykens), 10/07/2014-18/07/2014
  • Wenxiang Lu (host Johan Suykens), 01/07/2014-01/08/2014
  • Andrea Laruelo (host Sabine Van Huffel), 23/06/2014-04/07/2014

UNamur

• Post-Docs
  • Yerali Gandica, host: Timoteo Carletti (01/06/2014)
  • Daniel Casanova, host: Anne Lemaître (01/07/2014)
• Visitors
  • Ying TANG, PhD student on "Systems of conservation laws" at Gipsa-lab, Department "Automatique", Université de Grenoble, France. She will work with J. Winkin on "control of hyperbolic systems" (July 3-4, 2014)
  • Elarbi Achhab, Université Chouaïb Doukkali, Faculté des Sciences El Jadida, Département de Mathématiques, El Jadida, Maroc. He will work with J. Winkin on "feedback stabilization of infinite dimensional systems with state constraints" (August 15 - September 14, 2014)

Seminars

UCL

• June 30, 2014 – 11:00, Euler seminar room
  Kuang Xu (MIT), On the power of (even a little) Flexibility in Dynamic Resource Pooling

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.

• July 4, 2014, 1 pm
  Ying TANG (Gipsa-lab, université de Grenoble, France), Approximation of singularly perturbed linear hyperbolic systems

Graduate School in Systems, Optimization, Control and Networks

The SOCN Graduate School 2014-2015 programme will be available soon.

Study Days, Workshops and Summer Schools

Mini-symposium "Complex Networks: Models and Applications" and PhD defence of Rocco Langone

Date : July 2, 2014 : 9:30 - 18:00

Location : Auditorium of the Arenberg castle (room 01.07), Kasteelpark Arenberg 1, 3001 Leuven

Program :

09:30 - 10:30 "Non-Markovian Models of Networked Systems" by Renaud Lambiotte (Universite de Namur)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 - 12:00 "Industrial Applications of Kernel Spectral Clustering: Improving Power Load Forecasting and Detecting Sentence Similarity in Argument Construction" by Carlos Alzate (IBM Research-Ireland)
14:00 - 16:00 PhD defence : "Clustering evolving data using kernel-based methods" by Rocco Langone (KU Leuven, ESAT-STADIUS)
16:00 - 18:00 Reception

Contact : Prof. Dr.ir. Johan Suykens, KULeuven, ESAT-STADIUS (johan.suykens@esat.kuleuven.be)

BIL 2014 : Local Workshop on Data-driven Modeling Methods and Applications

Date : July 14-15, 2014, Leuven, Belgium

Web site : http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/stadius/bil2014/

Summer School on Numerical Optimal Control - August 4-13, 2014, Freiburg

The aim of this intensive 8 day course is to give both theoretical background and hands-on practical knowledge in the solution of optimal control problems with underlying differential equation models, as they arise for example in robotics, chemical engineering, biology, mechatronics or aerospace. Participants will learn how to formulate and to numerically solve complex optimal control problems with the help of state-of-the-art computing tools.

All lecture topics are accompanied by intensive computer exercises, for which we use the free and opensource optimization environments YALMIP and CASADI. In the last three days of the course, the participants will work, during the exercise sessions, on self chosen optimal control problems, whose results will be publicly presented to all course participants on the last day.

Location and schedule : the course takes place from Monday, August 4, 2014 to Wednesday August 13, 2014, from 9:00-18:00, in the main historical university building in the city center of Freiburg (Kollegiengebäude I, HS 1016, Platz der Universität 3 , D-79098 Freiburg). Lectures and computer exercises take place on August 4-8. In the weekend (August 9-10), an optional excursion into the black forest is foreseen. The written exam takes place on Monday, August 11, 9:00-10:30, and from then on participants work under close supervision on self-chosen application projects. The final project presentations take place on Wednesday, August 13.

Registration: Participation in the course is free of charge, while food and coffee and the optional excursion will require minor cost contributions. To register or obtain additional information, please write an email to Christine.Paasch@imtek.uni-freiburg.de with subject “NOC2014 Course Registration” before July 1st, 2014.

Teachers and Sponsors: Prof. Dr. Moritz Diehl, Dr. Joel Andersson, Joris Gillis, and Greg Horn, University of Freiburg and University of Leuven. Support by the EU via the ITNs TEMPO (607957) and SADCO (264735), and the ERC Project HIGHWIND (259166) is gratefully acknowledged.

The full announcement (PDF flyer) is available here.

TCMM 2014 - International Workshop on Technical Computing for Machine Learning and Mathematical Engineering

Date : September 8-12, 2014 - Leuven, Belgium

The workshop will provide a venue for researchers and practitioners to interact on the latest developments in technical computing in relation to machine learning and mathematical engineering problems and methods (including also optimization, system identification, computational statistics, signal processing, data visualization, deep learning, compressed sensing and big-data). A special attention will be paid to implementations on high-level high-performance modern programming languages suitable for large-scale, parallel and distributed computing and capable to efficiently handle structured data. The emphasis is especially on the open-source alternatives, including but not limited to Julia, Python, Scala and R.

The 3 days main event (8-10 September) will consist of invited and contributed talks as well as poster presentations.

It will be followed by a 2 days additional event (11-12 September) including software demos and hands-on tutorials on selected topics.

Attendees can register to the main event only or to the full workshop.

Submission of extended abstracts (no longer than 2 pages) are solicited for the main event. Accepted abstracts will be presented either in the format of poster presentation or as contributed talks. Submission of demo presentations will be solicited for the two days additional event. Additional details will be announced shortly.

Topics of Special Interest:

• Grid/Cloud/GPUs for technical computing
• High-performance/parallel computing and use of related libraries (e.g., Theano)
• Efficient handling of structured data and use of related libraries (e.g., Pandas)
• Data visualization and related libraries
• Methods for exploiting sparsity in implementations
• Templates for customized solvers for (convex/distributed) optimization
• Integration of high-level languages and use of related libraries (e.g., PyCall)
• Implementation case studies:
• Performance comparison of different high-level languages for technical computing
• Application of machine learning methods on challenging problems (e.g., Kaggle challenges)
• Libraries for machine learning and mathematical engineering

Important dates :

• Registration opens: June 11, 2014
• Deadline extended abstract/demo submission: July 31, 2014
• Deadline for registration: September 1, 2014

Invited speakers (confirmed) :

• James Bergstra, Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Univ. of Waterloo
• Jeff Bezanson, MIT
• Luis Pedro Coelho, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
• Stefan Karpinski, MIT
• Graham Taylor, School of Engineering, University of Guelph
• Ewout van den Berg, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Organizing committee :

• Marco Signoretto, Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven
• Johan Suykens, Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven
• Vilen Jumutc , Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven

For further information (including Submission, Registration, Location and Venue) see http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/stadius/tcmm2014/

Vacancies

Vacancy advertisements for 6 professorships in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of Ghent University, starting from October 1, 2014

• Full-time position of Assistant Professor Tenure Track or Associate Professor in the field of study "Multimedia" (see offer)
• Full-time position of Assistant Professor Tenure Track or Associate Professor in the field of study "Mathematics" (see offer)
• Full-time position of Assistant Professor Tenure Track or Associate Professor in the field of study "Sustainable Use and Reprocessing of Polymers and Composites" (see offer)
• Full-time position of Assistant Professor Tenure Track or Associate Professor in the field of study "Modelling, Optimization and Control of Electrical Energy Applications" (see offer)
• Full-time position of Assistant Professor Tenure Track or Associate Professor in the field of study "Photovoltaic Energy" (see offer)
• Full-time position of Assistant Professor Tenure Track or Associate Professor in the field of study "Mobile Cloud Computing" (see offer)

Papers produced by the IAP Network

UCL

Huang, Wen; Gallivan, K. A.; Srivastava, Anuj; Absil, P.-A., Riemannian Optimization for Elastic Shape Analysis, to appear in the proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS 2014)

Fernando De Teran, Froilan M. Dopico, Paul Van Dooren, Matrix polynomials with completely prescribed eigenstructure, submitted to Siam Journal on Matrix Analysis and its Applications, 2014

Latiers, Arnaud; Glineur, François; De Jaeger, Emmanuel, Toward semi-autonomous decentralized primary control from demand response, CIGRE Belgium Conference (Brussels, Belgium, 12/03/2014 - 14/03/2014). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/143727

Dorcimont, Charlotte; Absil, Pierre-Antoine, Algorithms for the nearest correlation matrix problem with factor structure, Householder Symposium XIX (Spa, Belgium, 8/06/2014 - 13/06/2014). In: Book of Abstracts of the Householder Symposium XIX on Numerical Linear Algebra, 2014, p. 7-8. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/144609

Teschendorff, Andrew E.; Renard, Emilie; Absil, Pierre-Antoine, Supervised normalization of large-scale omic datasets using blind source separation. In: Ganesh R. Naik, Wenwu Wang (Eds.), Blind source separation (Signals and Communication Technology), Springer, 2014, p. 465-497. 978-3-642-55015-7. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-55016-4_17. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/144607

KUL

Mall R., Langone R., Suykens J.A.K., Agglomerative Hierarchical Kernel Spectral Data Clustering, Internal Report 14-103, ESAT-SISTA, KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014.

Langone R., Alzate C., Bey-Temsamani A., Suykens J. A. K., Alarm prediction in industrial machines using autoregressive LS-SVM models, Internal Report 14-104, ESAT-SISTA, KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014.

Suykens J.A.K., Signoretto M., Argyriou A. (eds.), Regularization, Optimization, Kernels, and Support Vector Machines, Machine Learning & Pattern Recognition series, Chapman & Hall/CRC (Boca Raton , USA), 2014, 552 p.

Argyriou A., Signoretto M., Suykens J.A.K., Hybrid Algorithms with Applications to Sparse and Low Rank Regularization, in Chapter 3 in Regularization, Optimization, Kernels, and Support Vector Machines, (Suykens J.A.K., Signoretto M., and Argyriou A., eds.), Chapman & Hall/CRC (Boca Raton , USA), 2014, pp. 55-85.

Falck T., De Moor B., Suykens J.A.K., Kernel Based Identification of Systems with Multiple Outputs using Nuclear Norm Regularization, in Chapter 17 in Regularization, Optimization, Kernels, and Support Vector Machines, (Suykens J.A.K., Signoretto M., and Argyriou A., eds.), Chapman & Hall/CRC (Boca Raton, USA), 2014, pp. 387-415.

Jumutc V., Suykens J.A.K., New Bilinear Formulation to Semi-Supervised Classification Based on Kernel Spectral Clustering, Internal Report 14-109, ESAT-SISTA, KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2014.

K. Boons, E. Noriega, R. Van den Broeck, C.C. David, J. Hofkens and J.F. Van Impe, Effect of microstructure on population growth parameters of Escherichia coli in gelatin-dextran systems, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 2014 (Accepted for publication)

T. Skåra, V.P. Valdramidis, J.T. Rosnes, E. Noriega, J.F.M. Van Impe, A novel model to assess the efficacy of steam surface pasteurization of cooked surimi gels inoculated with realistic levels of Listeria innocua, Food Microbiology, 2014 (Accepted for publication)

J. Vanneste, W.J. Peumans, E.J.M. Van Damme, S. Darvishmanesh, K. Bernaerts, J.M.C. Geuns, B. Van der Bruggen, Novel natural and biomimetic ligands to enhance selectivity of membrane processes for solute-solute separations: beyond nature's logistic legacy, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology 89 (3): 354-371, 2014.

T.A. Cao, G. Van De Staey, I.Y. Smets, Integrating activated sludge floc size information in MBR fouling modeling, Proceedings of IWA Specialist Conference on Advances in Particle Science and Separation: from mm to nm scale and beyond, Saporo, Japan, 15-18 June 2014, pp 387-399.

VUB

Anna Marconato, Lennart Ljung, Yves Rolain, Johan Schoukens, Linking regularization and low-rank approximation for impulse response modeling, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

Egon Geerardyn, Tom Oomen, Johan Schoukens, Enhancing H-Infinity Norm Estimation using Local LPM/LRM Modeling: Applied to an AVIS, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

Goos, J., and R. Pintelon, Comparative study of two global affine Linear Periodic Parameter Varying State Space model estimation algorithms, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

John Lataire, Dario Piga, Roland Tóth, Frequency-domain least-squares support vector machines to deal with correlated errors when identifying linear time-varying systems, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

Koen Tiels, Maarten Schoukens, Johan Schoukens, Generation of initial estimates for Wiener-Hammerstein models via basis function expansions, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

Schoukens J., Tiels K., and Schoukens M., Generating initial estimates for Wiener-Hammerstein systems using phase coupled multisines, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

Schoukens M., Tiels K., Ishteva L., and Schoukens J., Identification of parallel Wiener-Hammerstein systems with a decoupled static nonlinearity, Proceedings of 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town (South Africa), August 24-29, 2014

E. Louarroudi, R. Pintelon and J. Lataire, Accurate frequency domain measurement of the best linear time-invariant approximation of linear time-periodic systems including the quantification of the time-periodic distortions, Mechanical systems and signal processing, 48 (2014), pp 274-299

Koen Tiels, Johan Schoukens, Wiener system identification with generalized orthonormal basis functions, Automatica, accepted for publication

Mariya Ishteva, Konstantin Usevich, Ivan Markovsky, Factorization approach to structured low-rank approximation with applications, SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX), accepted for publication

Gerd Vandersteen and Adam Cooman, Nonlinear distortion analysis of circuits and systems, Tutorial 11 at the 2014 International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2014), Melbourne, Australia, June 1, 2014

Péter Zoltán Csurcsia, Johan Schoukens, István Kollár, John Lataire, Nonparametric Time Domain Identification of Linear Slowly Time-variant Systems using B-splines, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, accepted for publication

UNamur

Malbor Asllani, Daniel M. Busiello, Timoteo Carletti, Duccio Fanelli and Gwendoline Planchon, Turing patterns in multiplex networks, submitted

Gwendoline Planchon, Daniel M. Busiello, Malbor Asllani, Timoteo Carletti and Duccio Fanelli, Turing instabilities in anisotropic media. Unraveling the role of the discreteness, 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

Useful links : UCL | KUL | UGent | VUB | ULg | UMons | UNamur | Stanford | Princeton | MIT