I will motivate information freshness as an essential ingredient for performing monitoring and control tasks over wireless networks. To this end, I will introduce the notion of Age-of-Information (AoI) which has become popular in networking literature over the past decade. I will show that networked monitoring and control can be viewed as equivalent AoI optimization problems, and discuss how to solve these problems in single and multi hop networks. Next, I will discuss learning of AoI cost functions (when the mapping between system performance and information freshness is unknown and time-varying). For the final part of the talk, I will discuss WiSwarm - a wireless system for communication between multiple UAVs and a central base station - that brings our ideas from theory to the real world.
