CDS 273, Spring 2006

Frontiers in Control and Dynamical Systems

Spring 2006

• Organizers: Hideo Mabuchi (hmabuchi@caltech.edu) and Richard Murray (murray@caltech.edu)
• Class meetings: Wednesdays, 3:30 pm, after the CDS tea, in 104 Watson

The purpose of this course is to explore applications of tools from Control and Dynamical Systems to new problem domains. The course is organized around small teams consisting of CDS and non-CDS students who will work on projects of mutual interest in some faculty member's research area. Our main goals are for the participating CDS and science/engineering faculty to become more familiar with each other's work and expertise, and to get our graduate students interacting with one another.

The output of the course will be a short paper of the sort that could be sent to a conference. The paper should consist of a short description of the problem under study and the relevant CDS tools, followed by a preliminary set of results and a description of next steps to be pursued.

Students with limited background in CDS methods may be interested in taking CDS 104, which is offered concurrently with CDS 273. This course is taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-3 pm in 102 Steele.

Course Schedule

Week	Date	Event
1	29 Mar 06	Organizational meeting, 104 Watson @ 3:30 pm
2	5 Apr 06	First team meeting, 104 Watson @ 3:30 pm
3-4		Work in teams; define problem to be studied + approaches
5	26 Apr 06	Midterm presentations, 104 Watson @ 3:30 pm
6-9		Work in teams
10	2 Jun 06	Final reports due (by 5 pm)

Group Assignments

Project	Sponsor	Team
Dynamic Image Registration for Elevation Map Fusion midterm presentation	Arlene Cole-Rhodes	Pete Trautman Panagiota Stratou Vijay Gupta Ziad Fares
Nonlinear dynamics in Si micro- and nano-photonic systems midterm presentation	Oskar Painter	Abhishek Tiwari Marcos Nahman Tom Johnson Kartik Srinivasan
Metapopulation models of mussel beds	Bob Desharnais (Cal State LA)	Lucinda Robledo Richard Murray
Geometry of bio-locomotion and sensing in fluids midterm presentation	John Dabiri	Stephanie Chan David Pekarek Kakani Young Jifeng Peng Hisashi Date Elisa Franco
Drosophila grand challenge midterm presentation	Michael Dickinson	Sawyer Fuller Michael Epstein Will Dickson Andrew Straw Steve Waydo
Stochastic decision making in B. Subtilis midterm presentation	Michael Elowitz	Gentian Buzi Henrik Sandberg Raj Kulkarni Jean-Charles Delvenne Tamas Keviczky

Units and Grading

CDS 273 is a 6 unit course, offered either graded or pass/fail. Each team is expected to complete the following:

Project presentation: each team will make a short (10 min) presentation in week 5 of the class (midterms), describing the focus of their project. Comments on these presentations will be provided to the team for incorporation in the final report.

Final report: each team will prepare a paper describing their work during the term. This should build on the midterm report by including some preliminary results and/or case studies.

In order to complete the work for the term, each team should plan on meeting at least once per week. The first team meeting will be on Wednesday, 5 April, at 3:30 pm in 104 Watson (at which time a regular meeting time can be established by the team).

Links to additional information

• CDS 273 homepage (contains links to projects from previous years)
• CDS 101 - Principles of Feedback and Control
• CDS 104 - Introductory Concepts for Dynamical Systems
• Panel on Future Directions in Control, Dynamics, and Systems