Gioele Zardini: "Co-Design of Complex Systems: From Autonomy to Future Mobility"

Topos Institute Colloquium, 25th of April 2024.
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When designing complex systems, we need to consider multiple trade-offs at various abstraction levels and scales, and choices of single components need to be studied jointly. For instance, the design of future mobility solutions (e.g., autonomous vehicles, micromobility) and the design of the mobility systems they enable are closely coupled. Indeed, knowledge about the intended service of novel mobility solutions would impact their design and deployment process, while insights about their technological development could significantly affect transportation management policies. Optimally co-designing sociotechnical systems is a complex task for at least two reasons. On one hand, the co-design of interconnected systems (e.g., large networks of cyber-physical systems) involves the simultaneous choice of components arising from heterogeneous natures (e.g., hardware vs. software parts) and fields, while satisfying systemic constraints and accounting for multiple objectives. On the other hand, components are connected via collaborative and conflicting interactions between different stakeholders (e.g., within an intermodal mobility system). In this talk, I will present a framework to co-design complex systems, leveraging a monotone theory of co-design and tools from applied category theory. The framework will be instantiated in the task of designing future mobility systems, all the way from the policies that a city can design, to the autonomy of vehicles as part of an autonomous mobility-on-demand service. Through various case studies, I will show how the proposed approaches allow one to efficiently answer heterogeneous questions, unifying different modeling techniques and promoting interdisciplinarity, modularity, and compositionality. I will then discuss open challenges for compositional systems design optimization, and present my agenda to tackle them.

[@xxxdeadbeefxxx]

I don't understand what novel results were actually proven here, nor what the relation to category theory is.
It is troubling that what seems to be crankery is being promoted here.

[@can.ilmi.70]

I would disagree with you about the crackery. To properly grasp the concept of design problems and potential solutions using applied category theory, one needs an understanding of this field and applications, which might be less intuitive than graph theory for some. I think that is not you --given your alias (Category Theorist and generated potentially fake account at May 2nd 2024). For others, although graph theory is not overly simple, it may be relatively easier to comprehend, perhaps because ACT involves jargons and complex definitions such as poset, functor, morphism, etc., which are uncommon in other engineering domains. That said, mathematicians interest might be different than the engineers. So one's perspective might look crackery for the other. For better understanding of the applications, it would be useful to revisit the sample problems and ACT tools that were quickly glossed over and briefly mentioned as solvers during the presentation (25:14 - MCDPs (Monotone Co-Design Problems - MCDPL).
In short, the presented research aims to address a design problem and offer a feasible solution. Much of Gioele's research relies on Censi's work. If you check Censi’s former presentations, you will see many similar images and slides copied and pasted here, which is normal since Censi supervised Gioele and they collaborate. One challenge I see for ACT is the manual preparations of these steps. I believe in the future Gioele intends to alleviate this complexity through improved user experience (as he started to demonstrate in the diagram coloring) and possibly automate this tool in his new group, a point he highlighted as the last pillar of his presentation (44:00 and 25:14 -> esp. for the second I disagree to state that as user friendly as Gioele highlighted).
I think there are quite interesting questions at the end as well. Thank you Gioele for the presentation and TOPOS for sharing this with everyone.

[@xxxdeadbeefxxx]

​@@can.ilmi.70
Mathematicians prove theorems.
Scientists employ the scientific method, which involves first coming up a null-hypothesis.
The fact that this talk does neither of these things is a strong indication it is quackery. Due to the incoherent nature of the presentation, I don't see how it is possible for the listener to make a meaningful comparison to the literature.
I don't mean to personally insult anyone, but I don't think this kind of work should be disseminated by otherwise reputable sources.