Publications related to Physics-Inspired Methods for Networking and Communications

On the Theory and Practice of Modern Secure Messaging

Billions of people now have conversations daily over the Internet. A large portion of this communication takes place via secure messaging protocols that offer "end-to-end encryption'" guarantees and resilience to compromise like the widely-used Double Ratc ...

EPFL2024

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Hypergraph-Based Fast Distributed AC Power Flow Optimization

Colin Neil Jones, Yingzhao Lian, Yuning Jiang, Xinliang Dai

This paper presents a novel distributed approach for solving AC power flow (PF) problems. The optimization problem is reformulated into a distributed form using a communication structure corresponding to a hypergraph, by which complex relationships between ...

IEEE2023

Uncooperative Rendezvous in Space: Design of an Electronic Architecture for High Performance Avionic with Multi Sensor Input and Intensive Data Rate

Michaël Yannick Juillard

Active Debris Removal missions consist of sending a satellite in space and removing one or more debris from their current orbit. A key challenge is to obtain information about the uncooperative target. By gathering the velocity, position, and rotation of t ...

EPFL2022

Critical node selection method for efficient Max-Pressure traffic signal control in large-scale congested networks

Nikolaos Geroliminis, Anastasios Kouvelas, Dimitrios Tsitsokas

Decentralized signal control of congested traffic networks based on the Max-Pressure (MP) controller is theoretically proven to maximize throughput, stabilize the system and balance queues for single intersections under specific conditions. However, its pe ...

2022

Hardware and Software Support for RPC-Centric Server Architecture

Mark Johnathon Sutherland

Online services have become ubiquitous in technological society, the global demand for which has driven enterprises to construct gigantic datacenters that run their software. Such facilities have also recently become a substrate for third-party organizatio ...

EPFL2022

Geometry of the Loss Landscape in Overparameterized Neural Networks: Symmetries and Invariances

Wulfram Gerstner, Clément Hongler, Johanni Michael Brea, Francesco Spadaro, Berfin Simsek, Arthur Jacot

We study how permutation symmetries in overparameterized multi-layer neural networks generate `symmetry-induced' critical points. Assuming a network with

L

layers of minimal widths

r_1^*, \ldots, r_{L-1}^*

reaches a zero-loss minimum at $ r_1^*! \c ...

2021

Cooperative Data Exchange and Private Information Retrieval

Su Li

Coding techniques have been well studied and used for improving communication quality by combating noise and mitigating interference. Recently, it has been shown that the same coding techniques can also be exploited to further improve communication perform ...

EPFL2020

Estimating network travel time reliability with network partitioning

Nikolaos Geroliminis, Mohammadreza Saeedmanesh

Network travel time reliability can be represented by a relationship between network space-mean travel time and the standard deviation of network travel time. The primary objective of this paper is to improve estimation of the network travel time reliabili ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2020

On Maintaining Linear Convergence of Distributed Learning and Optimization Under Limited Communication

Na Li, Hossein Shokri Ghadikolaei

In distributed optimization and machine learning, multiple nodes coordinate to solve large problems. To do this, the nodes need to compress important algorithm information to bits so that it can be communicated over a digital channel. The communication tim ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2020

Morphology and morphodynamics of braided rivers: an experimental investigation

Daniel Vito Papa

Braided rivers form some of the most fascinating fluvial patterns found on Earth. They are identifiable by their unique morphology of complex networks of intertwined channels that spread across wide floodplains. Detailed knowledge of their dynamics is need ...

EPFL2020

Accurate Nod and 3D Gaze Estimation for Social Interaction Analysis

Yu Yu

Non-verbal behaviours play an important role in human communication since it can indicate human attention, serve as communication cue in interactions, or even reveal higher level personal constructs. For instance, head nod, a common non-verbal behaviour, c ...

EPFL2020

Local Vulnerabilities and Global Robustness of Coupled Dynamical Systems on Complex Networks

Melvyn Sandy Tyloo

Coupled dynamical systems are omnipresent in everyday life. In general, interactions between individual elements composing the system are captured by complex networks. The latter greatly impact the way coupled systems are functioning and evolving in time. ...

EPFL2020

Operating System and Network Co-Design for Latency-Critical Datacenter Applications

Evangelos Marios Kogias

Datacenters are the heart of our digital lives. Online applications, such as social-networking and e-commerce, run inside datacenters under strict Service Level Objectives for their tail latency. Tight latency SLOs are necessary for such services to remain ...

EPFL2020

Graph Signal Processing: Foundations and Emerging Directions [From the Guest Editors]

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Negar Kiyavash

The articles in this special section focus on graph signal processing. Generically, the networks that sustain our societies can be understood as complex systems formed by multiple nodes, where global network behavior arises from local interactions between ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2020

Reliable and Robust Cyber-Physical Systems for Real-Time Control of Electric Grids

Wajeb Saab

Real-time control of electric grids is a novel approach to handling the increasing penetration of distributed and volatile energy generation brought about by renewables. Such control occurs in cyber-physical systems (CPSs), in which software agents maintai ...

EPFL2019

Global robustness versus local vulnerabilities in complex synchronous networks

Philippe René Joseph Jacquod

In complex network-coupled dynamical systems, two questions of central importance are how to identify the most vulnerable components and how to devise a network making the overall system more robust to external perturbations. To address these two questions ...

2019

Scaling Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Matej Pavlovic

Online services are becoming more and more ubiquitous and keep growing in scale. At the same time, they are required to be highly available, secure, energy-efficient, and to achieve high performance. To ensure these (and many other) properties, replication ...

EPFL2019

A robust localization system for multi-robot formations based on an extension of a Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density filter

Alcherio Martinoli, Alicja Barbara Roelofsen

This paper presents a strategy for providing reliable state estimates that allow a group of robots to realize a formation even when communication fails and the tracking data alone is insufficient for maintaining a stable formation. Furthermore, the trackin ...

2020

Bits through Time

Elie Najm

In any communication system, there exist two dimensions through which the information at the source becomes distorted before reaching the destination: the noisy channel and time. Messages transmitted through a noisy channel are susceptible to modification ...

EPFL2019