Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications

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    Information-Theoretic Privacy through Chaos Synchronization and Optimal Additive Noise
    Murguia, C ; Shames, I ; Farokhi, F ; Nesic, D ( 2019-06-03)
    We study the problem of maximizing privacy of data sets by adding random vectors generated via synchronized chaotic oscillators. In particular, we consider the setup where information about data sets, queries, is sent through public (unsecured) communication channels to a remote station. To hide private features (specific entries) within the data set, we corrupt the response to queries by adding random vectors. We send the distorted query (the sum of the requested query and the random vector) through the public channel. The distribution of the additive random vector is designed to minimize the mutual information (our privacy metric) between private entries of the data set and the distorted query. We cast the synthesis of this distribution as a convex program in the probabilities of the additive random vector. Once we have the optimal distribution, we propose an algorithm to generate pseudorandom realizations from this distribution using trajectories of a chaotic oscillator. At the other end of the channel, we have a second chaotic oscillator, which we use to generate realizations from the same distribution. Note that if we obtain the same realizations on both sides of the channel, we can simply subtract the realization from the distorted query to recover the requested query. To generate equal realizations, we need the two chaotic oscillators to be synchronized, i.e., we need them to generate exactly the same trajectories on both sides of the channel synchronously in time. We force the two chaotic oscillators into exponential synchronization using a driving signal. Exponential synchronization implies that trajectories of the oscillators converge to each other exponentially fast for all admissible initial conditions and are perfectly synchronized in the limit only. Thus, in finite time, there is always a “small” difference between their trajectories. To implement our algorithm, we assume (as it is often done in related work) that systems have been operating for sufficiently long time so that this small difference is negligible and oscillators are practically synchronized. We quantify the worst-case distortion induced by assuming perfect synchronization, and show that this distortion vanishes exponentially fast. Simulations are presented to illustrate our results.
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    Ordinal Optimisation for the Gaussian Copula Model
    Chin, R ; Rowe, JE ; Shames, I ; Manzie, C ; Nešić, D ( 2019-11-05)
    We present results on the estimation and evaluation of success probabilities for ordinal optimisation over uncountable sets (such as subsets of R d ). Our formulation invokes an assumption of a Gaussian copula model, and we show that the success probability can be equivalently computed by assuming a special case of additive noise. We formally prove a lower bound on the success probability under the Gaussian copula model, and numerical experiments demonstrate that the lower bound yields a reasonable approximation to the actual success probability. Lastly, we showcase the utility of our results by guaranteeing high success probabilities with ordinal optimisation.
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    Communication Connectivity in Multi-agent Systems with Multiple Uncooperative Agents
    Ju, Z ; Shames, I ; Nešić, D (IEEE, 2019-06-01)
    We consider a multi-agent system that consists of two group of agents: clients and routers. Clients move according to their own agenda. Routers' control policy needs to be designed to maintain communication connectivity for others. A control policy is designed for the routers to maintain the communication connectivity between clients. The control policy consists of periodically computing desired positions in a distributed manner and then steering the routers to those desired positions. First, desired positions of routers are determined by an optimization problem which minimizes the length of the longest edge connecting a client and a router on a tree corresponding to the communication relationship between agents. Then, the routers are steered to those desired positions by motion control. Simulations are done assuming that all routers are quadrotor drones to illustrate the results.