Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Networks with Congestion Diversity

Featuring John Baras, Ph.D.
Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering and Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Maryland, College Park

Location:  Donald Bren Hall 6011
Free and open to the public

Abstract:
Trust and reputation are critical concepts in networks, communication, control, computer, social, web-based social, economic, biological. Trust evaluation leads to the development of relations and collaborations.  These evaluations are based either on direct communal monitoring and    inference by the nodes, or on indirect references and credentials. We describe new fundamental ways for analyzing and evaluating trust in autonomic networked systems. The indirect evaluation process is modeled as a path problem on a directed graph, where nodes represent entities, and edges represent trust relations. We develop a novel formulation of trust computation as linear iterations on partially ordered semirings. The direct trust evaluation process is modeled as iterated games on dynamic graphs. We present several explicit examples. We present the methodology of constrained coalitional dynamic games that we have developed for studying the effects of trust on collaboration. We provide several examples with quantitative evaluation of trust on distributed inference and control systems using a combination of these new algebraic and analytical methods.   

About the Speaker:
John S. Baras, Ph.D., is the Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
University of Maryland, College Park.  He earned a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1970, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University, 1971 and 1973, respectively. Since 1973, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Applied Mathematics Faculty, at the University of Maryland College Park. Since 2000, he has also been faculty member in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. Baras is the founding director of the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) from 1985 to 1991. Since 1991, has been the director of the Maryland Center for Hybrid Networks (HYNET).  He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He received the 1980 George Axelby Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society and the 2006 Leonard Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society.  Baras' research interests include control, communication and computing systems.