ICON Seminar in IoT: Silun Zhang (MIT)

Title: Towards privacy-protected and macroscopic interventions of networked systems

Abstract: With the significant development of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), networked systems encounter opportunities and also challenges. Firstly, due to information exchanges amongst nodes, all the advantages of networked systems are essentially at the cost of sacrificing individual privacy in the network. To address this issue, we proposed a privacy-preserving consensus approach based on Secret Sharing Schemes, whereby all nodes in a network can achieve an agreement on their states without exposing the states to other parties. Unlike existing works, the proposed privacy-preserving algorithm is resilient to node failures. When a node fails, the method can rebuild the lost node via the information kept in neighbors, even though no neighbor is allowed to know the exact state of the failing node. Moreover, the networked systems in the current IoT typically consist of a large number of participants, often too large for modeling and controlling each party individually. Therefore, we proposed a novel approach to characterizing the evolution of a large-scale networked system by a sequence of moments. In general, the moments represent statistics and as well realistically measured quantities of a cohort. With a proper selection of kernels, the corresponding moments can carry enough information such that specific collective behaviors and/or the state distribution of the overall system can be reconstructed by solving an inverse problem.

Bio: Silun Zhang is a Wallenberg Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT with the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. Currently, he is working with Prof. Munther Dahleh. Before he came to MIT, Silun received a Ph.D. degree in Optimization and Systems Theory from the Department of Mathematics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, in 2019. Silun obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Automation from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2011 and 2013, respectively. His research interests include privacy and security in autonomous systems, nonlinear control, rigid-body attitude control, and modelling large-scale systems.