Tuesday, March 02, 2004
521 Cory Hall, Hogan Room
2:00-3:00 p.m.

Dr. Brian Anderson

MacKay Visiting Professor
National ICT Australia (NICTA)

Agent Formations and Reformations

Abstract:

When formations of agents move in the plane or in three dimensional space, the shape of the formation needs to be maintained. The seminar introduces the use of rigidity ideas to ensure retention of the formation shape, with a focus on identifying the minimum number of inter-agent constraints that need to be fulfilled. Change of formation due to splitting, merging, or closing ranks (following the loss of one or more agents) is also considered.

Professor Anderson received his undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at Sydney University, and his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

He worked in industry in the United States and at Stanford University before 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. For approximately one year to May 2003, he was the inaugural CEO of the newly formed National ICT Australia, established by the Australian Government through the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and the Australian Research Council under the Information and Communication Technologies Centre of Excellence program. He has held many visiting appointments in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Professor Anderson has served as a member of a number of government bodies, including the Australian Science and Technology Council and the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He is also a member of the Board of Cochlear Limited, the world's major supplier of cochlear implants. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia. In 1989, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, and in 2002 a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering. He holds honorary doctorates of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and New South Wales. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993.

He 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.

Professor Anderson became the Chief Scientist of National ICT Australia in May 2003.