KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Autonomous Reconfigurable Sensor Networks Using Game Theory

Prof. Vikram Krishnamurthy
University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

Decentralized awareness in a sensor network requires decentralized information processing. The idea is that if each sensor or small group of sensors can appropriately adapt their behavior to locally observed conditions, they can quickly self-organize into a functioning network, eliminating the need for difficult and costly centralized control.
This talk deals with decentralized information processing and social learning in sensor networks using game theoretic methods.The talk comprises of three parts. In the first part, we describe how social learning leads to the remarkable behavior of rational herding, where all sensors eventually end up taking the same action. In the second part of the talk, we illustrate how the theory of global games gives a powerful method for designing decentralized data-aware sensor activation algorithms in dense sensor networks. We show that the Nash equilibrium of the sensor network has a simple threshold structure and exhibits a remarkable phase transition as more data is collected. In the third part of the talk we describe how decentralized adaptive filtering algorithms with regret matching can be deployed in sensor networks to guide network behavior to a correlated equilibrium. A major theme of the talk is how simple local behavior can result in sophisticated global behavior.

Biography of the Keynote Speaker

Vikram Krishnamurthy was born in 1966. He received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1988 (with Honors I), and doctoral degree from the Australian National University, Canberra in 1992. Vikram Krishnamurthy is currently a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Signal Processing at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He also holds a BC Advanced Systems Institute Fellowship. His research interests are in Bayesian signal processing, game theory and stochastic control and their applications in sensor networks, wireless communications, and large scale biomolecular simulation.
Until 2002, Vikram was a chaired professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia where he also served as deputy head of department.
Dr. Krishnamurthy served as an associate editor for several international journals: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Systems and Control Letters, Journal of Bionanoscience, and EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing. He is also a guest editor of a special issue of IEEE Transactions Nanobioscience in Ion Channels (March 2005), guest editor of the special issue of Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (July 2007) on Biological Nanotubes. He has served on the technical program committee of several conferences including the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, IFAC World Congress, IFAC Symposium on System Identification (2000,2003), Globecom (2004,2005), International Communications Conference (ICC 2005, 2006), SPAWC (2005), American Controls Conference (ACC) etc. He is an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing society on Theoretical Methods.
Dr Krishnamurthy has been elected Fellow of the IEEE, awarded the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair awarded the Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship in 2001, the Australian Telecommunications Research Board Outstanding Young Investigator Medal in 1996 and the Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship in 1994 from the Australian Research Council.