Dr. Mandayam presents at Lehigh University for I-CPIE's Horizons Distinguished Seminar Series.
In February, Lehigh University’s Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure & Energy (I-CPIE) hosted Dr. Narayan Mandayam for the Horizons Distinguished Seminar Series, which brings noted experts from government, academia, and industry to Lehigh to share insights into trends in infrastructure and energy science, technology, and policy. Dr. Mandayam is the Distinguished Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University and Associate Director of Rutgers’ Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB).
As a pioneer in the application of microeconomic principles to the radio resource allocation problem in wireless data networks, Dr. Mandayam has made fundamental connections between the efficiency of resource allocation and interference management using “pricing” (a form of policing). His work has formed the basis of radio resource management algorithms that are used in real-world wireless networks.
In his talk, “Towards Resilient Smart Cities,” Dr. Mandayam discussed using models from game theory, prospect theory, and other behavioral theories to instill resilience in smart city design. In a smart city, cyber-physical critical infrastructures—like transportation, wireless systems, water networks, and power grids—are integrated to share energy, computing, wireless services, economic investments, and users/operating personnel.
These infrastructures face many challenges, including daily wear and tear, natural disasters, and potential malicious attacks, that can cause failures in the system. The connectivity across infrastructure in a smart city means that these failures can have cascading effects as they spread from one infrastructure to another. Dr. Mandayam addressed how protecting smart cities from failures and damage requires both making critical infrastructures resilient and reallocating resources to recovery resources. He also emphasized how understanding and influencing the behavior of people is essential.
Dr. Shalinee Kishore, I-CPIE Associate Director and Iacocca Chair Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, invited Dr. Mandayam to participate in the series. “The research and collaborations that Dr. Mandayam is involved with through his work merging smart infrastructure systems with user behavior and economic theories,” she notes, “is very much like the research that I-CPIE is promoting and committed to building at Lehigh.” Dr. Kishore first met Dr. Mandayam as a graduate student at Rutgers and has followed his research over the years, watching as he has continued to build interdisciplinary connections.
