I am a PhD Candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley, and am co-advised
by Andy Packard and
Murat Arcak.
My major is Control, Intelligence and Robotics, and my minors are Computational Science Engineering
and Statstics. I work in the Berkeley Center for Control and Identification
(BCCI).
I have two B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University.
I am graduating this December 2012, and was an
Insight Data Science Fellow in August 2012.
In January, I'll be starting a full time position at Facebook.
Background
I enable stability analysis of large-scale dynamical systems such as the Internet, airplanes and biological reaction networks. A system is unstable if control of the system is lost. The consequences of an unstable system are drastically different depending on the application: packet drops from servers on the Internet; airplane crashes; or cancerous cell mutations. Existing approaches for determining stability cannot be applied to large-scale problems due to their memory and computation requirements. I employ a divide-and-conquer approach wherein I leverage the weak coupling between subsystems and tackle each individually, which leads to smaller, more tractable computations. Unlike existing approaches, my work is amenable to implementation on a distributed system.
Research Interests
- Control Systems
- Machine Learning / Data Mining
- Natural Language Processing
- Optimization
- Network Systems
- Robotics
- Power Systems
- Space Systems
Short Projects
My research interests are vast, and I keep myself busy with side-projects, a few are:
- Politwitics: Finding hidden political topics from twitter [follow us!]
- Conference Schedule App [check it out!]
- Wind Forecasting: Prediction of wind using machine learning
[paper]
Publications
Further results on delay robustness of interconnected passive systems
Erin Summers, Murat Arcak, and Andrew Packard
IEEE American Control Conference, 2012.
[paper]
Delay robustness of interconnected passive systems: An integral quadratic constraint approach (submitted)
Erin Summers, Murat Arcak and Andrew Packard
IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2012
Quantitative local analysis for nonlinear systems (submitted)
Erin Summers, Abhijit Chakraborty, Weehong Tan, Ufuk Topcu, Pete Seiler, Gary Balas, and Andrew Packard
International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, 2011
On time delay margin estimation for adaptive control and optimal control modification
Nhan Nguyen and Erin Summers
In AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference. Citeseer, 2011
[paper]
Evaluating the delay robustness of interconnected passive systems with a frequency-dependent integral quadratic constraint
Erin Summers, Murat Arcak and Andrew Packard
IEEE American Control Conference, 2011.
[paper]
L2 gain verification for interconnections of locally stable systems using integral quadratic constraints
Erin Summers and Andrew Packard
IEEE Conference on Decision and Control
[paper]
