Estimation and Control Under Adversarial Attacks

Abstract:
Everyday control systems work silently in the background to support much of the critical infrastructure we have grown used to. Water distribution networks, sewer networks, gas and oil networks, and the power grid are just a few examples of critical infrastructure that rely on control systems for its normal operation. These systems are becoming increasingly networked both for distributed control and sensing, as well as for remote monitoring and reconfiguration. Unfortunately, once these systems become connected to the internet they become vulnerable to attacks that, although launched in the cyber domain, have for objective the manipulation of the physical domain. In this talk I will discuss the problem of state-estimation and control for linear dynamical systems when some of the sensors and actuators are subject to an adversarial attack.

Bio:
Paulo Tabuada was born in Lisbon, Portugal, one year after the Carnation Revolution. He received his "Licenciatura" degree in Aerospace Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal in 1998 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002 from the Institute for Systems and Robotics, a private research institute associated with Instituto Superior Tecnico. Between January 2002 and July 2003 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. After spending three years at the University of Notre Dame, as an Assistant Professor, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he established and directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory.
Paulo Tabuada's contributions to cyber-physical systems have been recognized by multiple awards including the NSF CAREER award in 2005, the Donald P. Eckman award in 2009 and the George S. Axelby award in 2011. In 2009 he co-chaired the International Conference Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC'09) and in he was program co-chair for the 3rd IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems (NecSys'12) in 2012. He currently serves as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and his latest book, on verification and control of hybrid systems, was published by Springer in 2009.