I'm going to talk today a bit about this interplay, I guess, between network structure

and function that we like to think about.

And in particular, in the context of complex systems and applications motivated by the

brain.

And this is just work with Erfanos Ari, which is an assistant professor now at UCF Riverside

used to be my PhD student.

He's the one actually that got me interested in this intersection between control and neuroscience.

And also my colleague, collaborator, professor of our university at UCF Riverside.

So I thought I should start giving you a little bit of an overview of what I like to work

on broadly and then focus a little bit more on the topic of the talk.

But if I have to summarize what my research is on, I would say that I like to look at

network systems and the control of network systems, I guess.

And then we have two basic goals.

One is understanding the mechanisms or the algorithms, I guess, or the routines, right?

That networks use and make them function.

And then to that understanding, there is a touch to that understanding.

There is a second goal, which is to leverage it or make use of it to design engineering

systems that have predictable behavior.

And so I guess network systems are present around us everywhere.

We see them in nature.

There you have a wild beast migrating in the setting.

This is a picture of the school of fees, you know, also the brain.

And they are also all around us when you think of engineering systems, intelligent transportation

and autonomous vehicles, the internet of things or the power grid.

So I try to think of a kind of category of questions where I can sort of structure the

type of issues or problems that we deal with.

And this is the sample questions that I came up with.

And so they are a little bit genetic, but they kind of help you get a sense of the type

of things that interest us.

And so for instance, we look at network systems, we look at the organization within the

network, the organization of the system.

So we look at the architecture, if this thing is centralized kind of organization or if

it is a more horizontal peer to peer distributed, and I guess anything in between maybe hierarchies

and things like this.

The other question that we look at, which is the one that we will talk about more today,

is this interplay between the organization or the structure of the network, the dynamics

of the individual entities and function on how these results in the behavior of the network.

When we put more our kind of analytical fact, then we like to try to understand how this

mechanism works for mathematical systems kind of perspective.

In engineering, we are always limited by the amount of resources that we have.

So it's good to try to answer this question as to how much can we do with what we have,

and how can we optimize the use of the resources.

The role of information is also critical, who has the information, how is the information

being transmitted, how valuable that information is or is not.

And then because of my mathematical background, there is always this particular focus on getting

guarantees on correctness, on robustness, on performance, and things like that.

So this is like a very high level summary.

Instead, today I thought that we could focus on a couple of works where we have tried to,

because these questions are very broad.

So, so the kind of a particular instantiation of this question as to how does network