Speakers

Bahman Gharesifard, Queen's Univesity

A Small-Gain Analysis of Single Timescale Actor Critic

Baham Gharesifard is a Professor and Area Director for Signals and Systems at the Electrical \& Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles. He was an Associate Professor, from 2019 to 2021, and an Assistant Professor, from 2013 to 2019, with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen's University. He was an Alexander von Humboldt research fellow with the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control at the University of Stuttgart in 2019-2020. He held postdoctoral positions with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University of California, San Diego 2009-2012 and with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2012- 2013. He received the 2019 CAIMS-PIMS Early Career Award, jointly awarded by the Canadian Applied & Industrial Math Society and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, a Humboldt research fellowship for experienced researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2019, an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement in 2019, and the SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize 2021. His research interests include systems and control, distributed control, distributed optimization, machine learning, social and economic networks, game theory, geometric control theory, geometric mechanics, and applied Riemannian geometry.

Ahmed Allibhoy, University of California, Riverside

Oscillator Ising Machines: Global Optimization via Coupled Oscillator Networks 

Ahmed Allibhoy is currently a postdoctoral scholar at UC Riverside. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics and electrical engineering from UCLA in 2018, the M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from UC San Diego in 2020, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from UC San Diego in 2023. His main research interests include online optimization of dynamical systems, nonsmooth dynamics, synchronization in coupled oscillator networks, and their applications to network neuroscience, systems biology, and artificial intelligence. 

Timm Faulwasser, Technical University of Hamburg 

Towards Scalable Distributed NMPC – Decentralized Algorithms for Dynamic Real-Time Collaboration

Timm Faulwasser is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics at Hamburg University of Technology, while before he held a professorship at TU Dortmund University. He has studied Engineering Cybernetics with minor in philosophy at the University of Stuttgart. After doctoral studies in the International Max Planck Research School for Analysis, Design and Optimization in Chemical and Biochemical Process Engineering Magdeburg he obtained his PhD from the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany in 2012. He has been postdoctoral researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2013-2016) and senior researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2015-2019). Previously, Timm was a member of the IEEE-CSS Conference Editorial Board and associate editor of the European Journal of Control. Currently, he serves as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the IEEE Control System Letters, and Mathematics of Control Systems and Signals. Timm received the 2021-2023 Automatica Paper Prize. His current research interests are optimization-based and data-driven control of stochastic, nonlinear and interconnected systems as well as systems and control approaches to learning.

Giuseppe Belgioioso, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Online Feedback Equilibrium Seeking

Giuseppe Belgioioso is an Assistant Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Digital Futures, Sweden.  He received the bachelor's degree in Information Engineering in 2012 and the master's degree (summa cum laude) in Automatic Control Engineering in 2015, both at the University of Padova, Italy. In 2020, he obtained the PhD degree in Automatic Control at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands. From 2020 to 2024, he was a Postdoc and Senior Scientist at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. In 2019, he was also a visiting PhD student  at the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering (ECEE) at Arizona State University (ASU), USA. His research focuses on modelling, analysis, and control of complex systems such as energy and transportation networks.

Luca Furieri, University of Oxford

Learning to Optimize with Guarantees

Luca Furieri is a Principal Investigator at EPF Lausanne since 2023. He will join the University of Oxford as an Associate Professor in June 2025. His research focuses on optimal control and optimization for distributed decision-making and large-scale cyber-physical systems. Previously, he has been a Postdoctoral researcher at the Automatic Control Laboratory, EPFL. In 2020, he has been awarded a Ph.D. degree in Control and Optimization from ETH - Zurich. He has received the SNSF Ambizione career grant in 2022, the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Best Paper Award in 2022, and the American Control Conference O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award in 2018. 

Andrea Iannelli, University of Stuttgart

A Linear Parameter-Varying Framework for the Analysis Optimization

Andrea Iannelli is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control at the University of Stuttgart (Germany). He completed his MSc in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Pisa (Italy) and received his PhD from the University of Bristol (United Kingdom) on robust control and dynamical systems theory. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zürich (Switzerland). His main research interests are at the intersection of control theory, optimization, and learning, with a particular focus on robust and adaptive optimization-based control, uncertainty quantification, and sequential decision-making problems. He serves the community as Associated Editor for the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control and as IPC member of various international conferences in the areas of control, optimization, and learning. He is the general chair of the Symposium on Systems Theory in Data and Optimization (SysDO) 2024.

Guido Carnevale, University of Bologna

System Theory for Distributed Optimization and Optimal Control

Guido Carnevale is a Junior Assistant Professor in the Dept.~of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering at University of Bologna. He received the M.Sc. degree summa cum laude in Automation Engineering from the University of Bologna, in 2019, and the PhD degree in Biomedical, Electrical, and Systems Engineering from the same university. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford in 2022. His research interests include distributed optimization and games over networks and optimal control.

Ivano Notarnicola, University of Bologna

A Passivity-Based Approach to Analyze the ADMM for Constrained-Coupled Optimization

Ivano Notarnicola received the MSc in Computer Engineering and the PhD degree in Engineering of Complex Systems from the University of Salento, Lecce (Italy) in 2014 and 2018, respectively. From 2018 to 2020, he was a Post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Bologna (Italy) where he is currently senior assistant professor. He received the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE CSS. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE CSS Conference Editorial Board. His ongoing research focuses on distributed optimization, optimal control algorithms and system theory for optimization algorithms in learning and network systems.