CISE/Hariri Institute Distinguished Speaker Seminar with Naomi Ehrich Leonard, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

Talk Title: “Spiking Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics (S-NOD) for Agile Decision-Making and Control”

Abstract: Leonard will introduce Spiking Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics (S-NOD), which enables decision–making and control with superior agility in responding to and adapting to fast and unpredictable changes in context, environment, or information received about available options. S-NOD derives through the introduction of an extra term to the previously presented Nonlinear Opinion Dynamics (NOD), which have been shown to provide fast and flexible multiagent behavior. The term is inspired by the fast-positive, slow–negative mixed-feedback structure of excitable systems. The agile behaviors brought about by the new excitable nature of decision-making driven by S-NOD are analyzed in a general setting and illustrated in applications to robot navigation around human movers and to control of soft robotics.

Bio: Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is associated faculty with the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and the Biophysics Graduate Program, and affiliated faculty with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She is Founding Director of CreativeX, a Princeton engineering-and-the-arts collective, and Founding Editor of Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. Leonard received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the ASME, IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM. Recent awards include the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award and the 2024 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award. Her current research focuses on dynamics, control, and learning for multiagent systems on networks with application to multi-robot teams, collective animal behavior, and other networked systems in nature, technology, and the arts.