Professors George Bollas and Ebad Jahangir will be attending the INCOSE International Symposium 2016. They will engage with colleagues from the Systems Engineering community and share lessons learned on state-of-the-art methods and essential skills for Systems Engineers. UTC-IASE is a member of the INCOSE Corporate Advisory Board as well as its Academic Council.

INCOSE’s Annual International Symposium is the largest annual gathering of people who do systems engineering for four days of presentations, case studies, workshops, tutorials and panel discussions. The program attracts an international mix of professionals at all levels, and includes practitioners in government and industry, as well as educators and researchers.

Professor Krithi Ramamritham from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and formerly of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, presented a distinguished lecture on smart technologies. Smart Energy solutions promise cleaner, cheaper and more reliable energy. Smart Cities promise better quality of life for its citizens. He argued that for a “system” to be SMART, it should Sense Meaningfully, Analyze and Respond Timely. Using real-world examples from the domains of Smart Energy and Smart Cities, this talk illustrated the central role of data in being SMART.

To view more details or a video of the lecture, please visit http://advancedsystems.engineering.uconn.edu/events/lec-lib/dll2016/.

Professor Calin Belta from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Division of Systems Engineering at Boston University, presented a seminar on formal method for dynamical systems at the UTC-IASE. Professor Belta, who is also affiliated with the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) and the Bioinformatics Program, talked about an increasing need for computational tools for verification and control of complex systems from rich, temporal logic specifications. In control theory, complex models of physical processes, such as systems of differential equations, are usually checked against simple specifications, such as stability and set invariance. In formal methods, rich specifications, such as languages and formulae of temporal logics, are checked against simple models of software programs and digital circuits, such as finite transition graphs. The formal verification and synthesis problems have been shown to be undecidable even for very simple classes of infinite-space continuous and hybrid systems. The focus of this talk was on discrete time linear systems, for which it was shown that finite abstractions can be constructed through polyhedral operations only. By using techniques from model checking and automata games, this allows for verification and control from specifications given as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae over linear predicates in the state variables. The usefulness of these computational tools was illustrated with various examples.

To view more details or a video of the seminar, please visit http://advancedsystems.engineering.uconn.edu/events/sem-lib/sl2016/.