Emma Tegling is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in automatic control at the Department of Automatic Control at Lund University. Dr Tegling was recruited by WASP in 2021.
WASP Recruited Faculty.
WASP granted me a unique opportunity to come back to Sweden and kickstart my career with my own research group.
Aside from the obvious — generous research funding — I most appreciate the contact network within both academia and industry. The ambitious graduate school with international exchange opportunities is great for the Ph.D. students.
Large-scale complex networks, such as electric power networks, traffic systems, or even social or financial networks, rely on the individual control decisions and local feedback interactions between many, many autonomous subsystems or agents.
In my group, we want to understand how these local feedback interactions should be designed for the network as a whole to behave as it should. For example, we want to guarantee stability, robustness and resilience. Here, we often need to consider both dynamical and network topological aspects of the systems.
We also seek to explain and model large-scale phenomena arising in large social networks (such as consensus, echo chambers, polarization) through small-scale interactions over sociotechnical networks.
My research helps explain what is feasible and not when designing large networks that rely on local feedback and control decisions. For example, we can show that it is fundamentally difficult to control a long chain of vehicles driving close to each other. This highlights a need for, for example, communications infrastructure that enables additional feedback.
I also hope that our research on sociotechnical network systems can help us understand how modern technology is shaping our ever more interconnected society.
