CSS Bode Lecture and Plenary Lectures

The CSS Bode Lecture:
Semper in motu: Transforming mobility through learning and control

Abstract: The transformation of the transport sector is continuously in motion. Through advances in sensing, connectivity, computing, and electrification, the control community has been, and will continue to be, actively engaged in shaping a sustainable and efficient infrastructure for moving people and goods. While self-driving technologies have garnered significant attention, achieving widespread, safe deployment remains a challenge. Meanwhile, innovations in optimizing and enhancing the resilience of transport systems continue to advance, highlighting the broader impact of control technology on mobility. This lecture will explore the emerging field of learning-enabled cyber-physical-human systems and discuss some specific examples in intelligent transport. We will show how connected vehicles acting as mobile sensors and actuators can enable traffic predictions and control at a scale never before possible, by learning traffic models using physics-informed machine learning techniques. The complexities of safe interactions between automated and human-driven vehicles will be discussed, emphasizing the integration of formal reasoning methods and the use of tele-operation. The presentation highlights joint work with students, postdocs, and collaborators in academia and industry.

Biography: Karl H. Johansson is Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Director of Digital Futures. He received MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Automatic Control from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Caltech, NTU among other institutions. His research interests are in networked control systems and cyber-physical systems with applications in transportation, energy, and automation networks. For his scientific contributions, he has received several best paper awards and other distinctions from IEEE, IFAC, and other organizations. He has been awarded Distinguished Professor by Swedish Research Council, Wallenberg Scholar with the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Future Research Leader from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the triennial IFAC Young Author Prize, and IEEE CSS Distinguished Lecturer. He is Fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE CSS Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize. His services to the community include currently being IEEE CSS Vice President Diversity, Outreach & Development, Member of IFAC Council, and Immediate Past President of the European Control Association. He has been on the Editorial Boards for Automatica, IEEE TAC, IEEE TCNS and many other journals. He has served on the Swedish Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering Sciences.

Ask not what AI can do for control, ask what control can do for AI

Abstract: AI has drastically changed the landscape of several engineering disciplines, such as computer vision and natural language processing, and is now an integral part of several commercial products. In this talk I will argue, through several vignettes, that ideas and techniques from control can help answer fundamental questions about the power, limitations, and societal impact of AI.

Biography: Paulo Tabuada was born in Lisbon, Portugal, one year after the Carnation Revolution. He received his “Licenciatura” degree in Aerospace Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal in 1998 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002 from the Institute for Systems and Robotics, a private research institute associated with Instituto Superior Tecnico. Between January 2002 and July 2003, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. After spending three years at the University of Notre Dame, as an Assistant Professor, he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he currently is the Vijay K. Dhir Professor of Engineering. Paulo Tabuada's contributions to control and cyber-physical systems have been recognized by multiple awards including the NSF CAREER award in 2005, the Donald P. Eckman award in 2009, the George S. Axelby award in 2011, the Antonio Ruberti Prize in 2015, the grade of fellow awarded by IEEE in 2017 and by IFAC in 2019. He has been program chair and general chair for several conferences in the areas of control and of cyber-physical systems such as NecSys, HSCC, and ICCPS. He currently serves on the HSCC steering committee and served on the editorial board of the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Towards Safe and Resilient Autonomy Using Synergistic Control, Observation and Learning

Abstract: Enabling autonomy for robotic and cyber-physical systems with provable safety and resilience guarantees has been an ongoing area of research. Despite significant progress over the years, there are still open challenges due to constraints (e.g., safety and time specifications; sensing, computation and communication limitations), and environmental uncertainty. This plenary talk will present some of our recent results and ongoing work on a framework that interconnects control, planning and learning methods towards provably-correct safety-critical robotic and aerospace systems under constraints and uncertainty.

Biography: Dimitra Panagou received the Diploma and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. In September 2014 she joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor. Since July 2022 she is an Associate Professor with the newly established Department of Robotics, with a courtesy appointment with the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she was a postdoctoral research associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2012-2014), a visiting research scholar with the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania (June 2013, Fall 2010) and a visiting research scholar with the University of Delaware, Mechanical Engineering Department (Spring 2009). Her research program spans the areas of nonlinear systems and control; multi-agent systems, autonomy and control; and aerospace robotics. She is particularly interested in the development of provably-correct methods for the safe and secure (resilient) operation of autonomous systems in complex missions, with applications in robot/sensor networks and multi-vehicle systems (ground, marine, aerial, space) under uncertainty. She is a recipient of the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the George J. Huebner, Jr. Research Excellence Award, and a Senior Member of the IEEE and the AIAA.

From Dissipativity to the Design of Controllers for Optimization

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in considering optimization algorithms as feedback systems. This viewpoint turns, for example, the analysis of the convergence properties of a first order algorithm into a problem of stability analysis of a Lur'e system. In this talk we highlight why dissipativity plays a key role for developing unprecedented tools to analyze the convergence properties of first order algorithms for solving convex programs. In contrast to alternative approaches, we reveal that the proposed avenue permits not only the analysis but also the systematic design of optimization algorithms using convex semi-definite programming. We substantiate that the proposed tools form a promising ingredient of a system theory for the design of controllers for optimization.

Biography: Carsten W. Scherer received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Würzburg (Germany) in 1991. In 1993, he joined Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) where he held positions as an assistant and associate professor. From 2001 until 2010 he was a full professor at the Delft Center for Systems and Control at Delft University of Technology. Since March 2010 he holds the SimTech Chair for Mathematical Systems Theory in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Stuttgart (Germany). Dr. Scherer acted as the chair of the IFAC technical committee on Robust Control, and he has served as an associated editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, Systems and Control Letters and the European Journal of Control. He is an IEEE fellow “for contributions to optimization-based robust controller synthesis.” Dr. Scherer's main research activities cover various topics in applying optimization techniques for developing new advanced controller design algorithms and their application to mechatronics and aerospace systems.