Distinguished ICON Seminar by Prof. Brian D. O. Anderson (ANU)

Abstract:  Social network analysis is a rich and exciting area of interdisciplinary research that has been tackled by many different scientific communities. Much research draws on ideas of control and systems theory to infer how the opinions of a group of interacting individuals evolve, and to explain the resulting behavior, often observed in experiments of sociologists, psychologists and the like, in terms of system dynamics concepts. This lecture will survey several distinct recent developments of this character. We shall present an opinion dynamics model which describes how an individual’s private and expressed opinions (which are not the same in general) evolve under pressure to conform to the majority opinion. In another direction we shall present new results on the recently proposed DeGroot-Friedkin model, which describes how an individual’s self-confidence (termed social power) in his/her own opinion evolves over discussion of a sequence of topics. One key finding is that every individual forgets his/her perceived (i.e. initial) social power exponentially fast, even when the network topology is dynamic. Lastly, we shall describe the opinion dynamics of interacting individuals holding multiple and logically dependent opinions on a number of issues.

Bio: Prof. Brian D. O. Anderson was born in Sydney, Australia. He took his undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at Sydney University, and his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. serving as Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Newcastle, Australia from 1967 through 1981. At that time, he took up a post as Professor and Head of the Department of Systems Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he was Director of the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering from 1994 to 2002.  He retired from the ANU as a Distinguished Professor and was appointed Emeritus Professor in July 2016. At that time he became Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Prof. Anderson is a research pioneer in many engineering fields including adaptive systems, sensor networks, optimal control and many other areas. His research contribution has been internationally recognized by many prestigious awards. To name a few, he is a recipient of the  IEEE Control Systems Society Bode Prize (1992),  the IEEE Control Systems Award (1997),  the IFAC Quazza Medal (1999),  the IEEE James H Mulligan Jr. Education Medal (2001), the IEEE Guillemin-Cauer Award (2001), and   the American Automatic Control Council John R. Ragazzini Education Award (2016). Prof. Anderson is a foreign member of National Academy of Engineering in USA, was President of the International Federation of Automatic Control for the triennium 1990 to 1993, and served as President of the Australian Academy of Science for four years from 1998 to 2002.

Seminar video: