3/26/2014 William Gillespie
Written by William Gillespie
Assistant Professor Alex Olshevsky is the latest faculty at ISE to receive the NSF CAREER Award.
According to the NSF, the "Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research."
The purpose of Professor Olshevsky's research ("Algorithms and Fundamental Limitations for Sparse Control") is to develop strategies to control and estimate large-scale systems by affecting or measuring them in only a few places. A motivating application is the control of chemical reaction networks within the human body: out of the ten thousand reagents within human metabolism, a typical drug will only interact with just a few of them. Another motivation comes from the problem of estimation in electric power grids: due to the large size of these grids, it is economically attractive to obtain knowledge of the entire grid's state by monitoring it in only a small number of places. The project will develop efficient algorithms for identification of a small number of ``sites'' which will allow large systems such as these to be efficiently observed and controlled from few inputs or few measurements.
Olshevsky explains further: "While the initial focus of the project is primarily theoretical, the methods developed here could have widespread applications throughout control theory. For example, the northeast blackout of 2003 in the United states occurred in part because decision-makers were unaware of the state of the power grid on the ground due to inaccurate and corrupted sensor measurements. This project will develop algorithms which can reconstruct system states from a small number of possibly corrupted measurements, allowing us to prevent situations like this."
Congratulations, Alex!