Abstract

A cancer cell is a plant with unknown dynamics, almost no sensors, a saturating and toxic actuator, and a hard constraint on how long you are allowed to act. Stated that way, cancer therapy design is a control problem intuition rather than with theory. and one the field currently answers with optimisation and This tutorial assumes no biology background. It builds the biology an engineer needs from first principles: the cell as a feedback system, signalling pathways as cascaded gain stages, cell fates as attractors of a regulatory network, and drug resistance as the network re-routing around your actuator. It then develops the modelling formalisms Boolean abstraction, and what that abstraction costs why the parameter problem forces a and shows where controllability, reachability, pinning control, Lyapunov functions on finite sets and observer design enter. The talk closes with six open problems, stated precisely enough for a student to start on.

About the Speaker

Dr. Aamer Iqbal Bhatti is Professor of Control and Instrumentation Engineering at KFUPM, affiliated with the IRC for Smart Mobility and Logistics Engineering, and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has published over 200 refereed papers, more than 90 of them in impact-factor journals, and has supervised some thirty PhD graduates. He founded the 30-member CASPR group, whose work produced four startups and six hardware prototypes, including Pakistan's first indigenous electronically scanned phased-array radar. He founded the Automatic Control Research Society, which represents Pakistan within IFAC, and chaired the IEEE Control Systems Society chapter that won the Society's Outstanding Chapter Award in 2014. His current research applies Boolean network control theory to cancer signalling. All faculty, researchers and graduate students are welcome