Sam Weyerman, a Ph.D. student, and Russell Howes, an undergraduate student, recently attended and presented at the 46th Annual IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). Sam and Russ are both currently members of IDeA Labs here at BYU. The conference, sponsored by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.), SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), and INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), was held in New Orleans, LA from 12-14 December 2007.
Sam Weyerman presented his paper "Monotonically Improving Error Bounds for a Sequence of Approximations for Makespan Minimization of Batch Manufacturing Systems" at the conference. This work, done in collaboration with his advisor, Dr. Sean Warnick, presents analysis on a sequence of approximations for a class of dynamic programming problems. They showed that the error due to the approximation is bounded and that these bounds monotonically improve as the approximation approaches the exact problem. This result allows decision makers to choose a level of approximation, and hence an amount of necessary computation to achieve a solution, with a guarantee of how good the solution will be.
Russell Howes and advisor Dr. Sean Warnick presented their paper "Dynamical Structure Functions for the Reverse Engineering of LTI Networks" in the main poster session. Their work, in collaboration with Dr. Jorge Gonçalves of Cambridge University, develops a method to represent the network structure of linear, time-invariant (LTI) systems. Dynamical structure functions contain information about both structure and dynamics of a system. This way of looking at network structure is especially useful in applications such as biochemical networks. Their main result uses dynamical structure to precisely characterize the additional information required to obtain network structure from the transfer function (input-output data) of the system.
IDeA Labs is led by directors Jeffrey Humpherys and Sean Warnick, both professors here at BYU. IDeA Labs is an acronym for Information and Decision Algorithms Laboratories. The labs house an interdisciplinary research program dedicated to a computational mathematics education for students who are well rounded technical problem solvers. The program centers around the research application of Algorithmic Decision Processes, the study of the dynamics of systems that process data in making decisions. More information about current projects can be found online at idealabs.byu.edu .
Article by Jake Mattinson, BYU IDeA Labs