Dan Davison
Associate Professor
ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
University of Waterloo
Canada
Biography
Dan Davison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include theoretical control, which involves various aspects of linear and nonlinear control, including performance limitations in feedback control, multi-agent control schemes, and time-delay systems. Professor Davison is also interested in applied control, in areas such as psychological systems with rich dynamics. Current projects include stabilization of crowds governed by notions of suggestibility, the modeling of cognitive dissonance, and the study of social psychological systems in which a person is influencing others to change their attitude. His approach towards research is that he allows applications to motivate the discovery of theories instead of the other way around, which reduces the need to force the finding of applications for theories. He has written various papers about control theory and its applications.
Research Interest
My research program deals with theoretical and applied control. My philosophy is to let the applications motivate the theory; this reduces the likelihood that there will be a desperate search for an application to which the theory applies (a surprisingly common problem in theoretical research) and, I believe, makes the research more exciting. My current application interests are in the field of social psychology, which basically deals with how people think about each other and influence each other. I am especially interested in psychological problems where the underlying dynamics include feedback. An example of feedback is the attitude-behaviour-attitude connection: our attitudes affect to some degree our behaviour, and (perhaps surprisingly, for those who have not studied psychology) our behaviour affects to some degree our attitudes. My research includes modeling such phenomena, simulating interesting scenarios, and developing control schemes. Recently we have started to work on experimental verification of our theoretical results.
Publications
-
Nejentsev S, Howson JM, Walker NM, Szeszko J, Field SF, Stevens HE, Reynolds P, Hardy M, King E, Masters J, Hulme J. Localization of type 1 diabetes susceptibility to the MHC class I genes HLA-B and HLA-A. Nature. 2007 Dec 6;450(7171):887.
-
Burton PR, Clayton DG, Cardon LR, Craddock N, Deloukas P, Duncanson A, Kwiatkowski DP, McCarthy MI, Ouwehand WH, Samani NJ, Todd JA. Association scan of 14,500 nonsynonymous SNPs in four diseases identifies autoimmunity variants. Nature genetics. 2007 Nov 1;39(11):1329-37.
-
Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls. Nature. 2007 Jun 7;447(7145):661.
