Lab Home | Phone | Search
	Center for Nonlinear Studies
	Home  ▶ People   Current   Executive Committee   Postdocs   Visitors   Students   Research   Publications  ▶ Conferences   Workshops   Sponsorship  ▶ Talks   Seminars   Postdoc Seminars Archive   Quantum Lunch   Quantum Lunch Archive   P/T Colloquia   Archive   Ulam Scholar     Postdoc Nominations  ▶ Student Requests   Student Program  ▶ Visitor Requests   Description   Past Visitors  ▶ Services   General     History of CNLS     Maps, Directions   CNLS Office   T-Division   LANL				Thursday, February 06, 202510:00 AM - 11:00 AMCNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690) Seminar Towards probabilistic safety of autonomous dynamical systems Meeko OishiUniversity of New Mexico Assurances of safety in autonomous systems require accounting for inevitable stochasticity, due not only to learning enabled components, but also human-in-the-loop actions, disturbance effects, and modeling errors. However, few methods and tools exist that are responsive to the often non-Gaussian stochasticity that can impact dynamical systems. We have developed stochastic controllers and probabilistic verification tools, both data-driven and model-based, that can accommodate stochastic processes with very little structure in a computationally efficient manner, without gridding, sampling, or recursion. These methods can provide probabilistic assurances of safety in stochastic dynamical systems, and have been extended to provide probabilistic assurances in neural nets, as well. We have employed methods based in Fourier transforms, chance constrained optimization, and Lagrangian approaches. Some of our approaches enable exact results, without gridding, sampling, or recursion, while others provide underapproximations that can still provide guarantees. Meeko Oishi received the Ph.D. (2004) and M.S. (2000) in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (Ph.D. minor, Electrical Engineering), and a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University (1998). She is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests include human-in-the-loop control, stochastic optimal control, and autonomous systems. She previously held a faculty position at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and postdoctoral positions at Sandia National Laboratories and at the National Ecological Observatory Network. She was a Visiting Researcher at AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate, and a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at The National Academies. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the NSF BRITE Fellowship, the Truman Postdoctoral Fellowship in National Security Science and Engineering, and a member of the 2022-2024 US Defense Science Study Group. Teams Join the meeting now Host: Juston Moore (XCP-AI4ND)