14 July 2010
Eduardo Sontag
Department of Mathematics
Rutgers University
When analyzing or designing systems made up of interconnected components, it is desirable to be able to predict global behaviors through a bottom-up analysis, based on the (partial) knowledge of behaviors of the individual components together with knowledge of the interconnection structure. Moreover, especially in studies in molecular systems biology, where little information is available about subsystems, it is important to base this analysis on a very small amount of "quantitative" information. Much of my research during the last few years has dealt with this general issue, based on monotone systems, and more recently on other qualitative classes of systems (passive, contractive). This lecture will describe several theoretical results along these lines.