List of speakers

Bio: Shaunak D. Bopardikar is an Assistant Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and is affiliated with the Center for Connected Autonomous Networked Vehicles for Active Safety (CANVAS) at Michigan State University. His research interests lie in autonomous motion planning and control, in cyber-physical security and in scalable computation and optimization. He received the Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) and Master of Technology (M.Tech.) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, in 2010. From 2004 to 2005, he was an Engineer with General Electric India Technology Center, Bangalore, India. From 2011 to 2018, he was a Staff Research Scientist with the Controls group of United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) at East Hartford, CT, USA and at Berkeley, CA. Prior to joining UTRC, Dr. Bopardikar worked as a post-doctoral associate at UC Santa Barbara (2010-2011) during which he developed randomized algorithms for solving large matrix games. He is a senior member of the IEEE, has over 70 refereed journal and conference publications and is a co-inventor on 2 U.S. patents. His recognitions include an Air Force Research Laboratory Summer Faculty Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Award and an IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy's Best Student Paper Award (as advisor). 

Bio: Hideaki Ishii received the M.Eng. degree from Kyoto University in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 2002. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2001 to 2004, and a Research Associate at The University of Tokyo from 2004 to 2007. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Computer Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has held visiting positions with CNR-IEIIT at Politecnico di Torino, University of Stuttgart, Technical University of Berlin, and the City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include networked control systems, multiagent systems, and cyber security of control systems. He was the Chair of IFAC Coordinating Committee on Systems and Signals for 2017-2023 and the IPC Chair of the IFAC World Congress, Yokohama, Japan, held in July 2023. He is a CSS Vice President since 2022 and an IEEE Fellow.

Bio: Tansu Alpcan received a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2006. His research interests include the game, optimization, control theories, and machine learning applications to security and resource allocation problems in communications, smart grids, and the Internet of Things. He chaired or was an Associate Editor, TPC chair, or TPC member of several prestigious IEEE workshops, conferences, and journals. Tansu Alpcan is the (co-)author of more than 150 journal and conference articles as well as the book “Network Security: A Decision and Game-Theoretic Approach” published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in 2011. He co-edited the book “Mechanisms and Games for Dynamic Spectrum Allocation” published by CUP in 2014. He has worked as a senior research scientist in Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, Germany (2006-2009), and as an Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessur) at Technical University Berlin (2009-2011). Tansu is currently a Professor and Reader with the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Melbourne.

Bio: Jie Fu received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2013, and subsequently worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar with the University of Pennsylvania from 2013 to 2015. From 2016 to 2021, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In 2021, she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida as an assistant professor. Fu's research focuses on developing control theory and planning algorithms for constructing secured (semi-)autonomous systems with high-level logic reasoning and adaptive decision-making capabilities.  Dr. Fu has also received several early career awards, including the AFOSR Young Investigator Award and the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2021, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2022. She has received funding for her research projects from ARO, NSF, DARPA, and AFOSR.

Bio: David Yau obtained the B.Sc. (first class honors) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, all in computer science. He is now Professor in the Information Systems Technology and Design pillar of the Singapore University of Technology and Design. In 2010-2022, he was Distinguished Scientist at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Singapore (a research center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), where he was also Cybersecurity Program Director. From 2015 to 2018, he was Qiushi Chaired Professor in the Department of Control, Zhejiang University, China. From 1997 to 2013 (on leave 2010-12), he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University (West Lafayette). In 2004, he was on sabbatical leave as Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, CUHK.

David’s research interests are in network protocol design and implementation, network and cyber-physical system security and privacy, quality of service (QoS), network incentives, and wireless sensor networks. He received an IBM Fellowship and a CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. He won Best Paper award in 2017 IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) and 2010 IEEE Int’l Conf. Multi-sensor Fusion and Integration (MFI). He was Mark Weiser Best Paper finalist of 2013 IEEE Int’l Conf. Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), and Best Paper finalists of 2013 ACM BuildSys, 2013 IEEE Int’l Conf. Cyber-Physical Systems, Networks, and Applications (CPSNA), and 2007 IEEE Int’l Conf. Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS).

Bio: Paula Chanfreut is an Assistant Professor in the Control Systems Technology section of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research is framed within the field of model predictive control (MPC), with emphasis on its non-centralized implementations. She is particularly interested in designing control methods for large-scale interconnected systems, including renewable energy plants, traffic networks, and smart grids. In this context, she has explored the use of flexible cooperation mechanisms to improve performance and scalability in multi-agent systems based on MPC. Additionally, she is interested in studying data-driven predictive control methods.

Bio: Takashi Tanaka  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin since 2017. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Tokyo in 2006, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UIUC in 2009 and 2012, all in Aerospace Engineering. Prior to joining UT Austin, he held postdoctoral researcher positions at MIT and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. His research interest is broad in control, optimization, games, and information theory; most recently their applications to networked control systems, real-time data sharing, and strategic perception. He is the recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award, and the NSF Career award.

Bio: Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis received the Diploma (a 5-year degree, equivalent to a Master of Science) in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece in 2006 with highest honors. After moving to the United States of America, he studied at The University of Texas at Arlington with Frank L. Lewis as his advisor, and he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2008 and 2011 respectively. During the period from 2012 to 2016 he was project research scientist at the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an assistant professor at the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech until 2018. He currently serves as the Dutton-Ducoffe Endowed Professor at The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He holds a secondary appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His expertise is in reinforcement learning, control theory, game theory, cyber-physical security, bounded rationality, and safe/assured autonomy. Dr. Vamvoudakis is the recipient of a 2019 ARO YIP award, a 2018 NSF CAREER award, a 2018 DoD Minerva Research Initiative Award, a 2021 GT Chapter Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award and his work has been recognized with best paper nominations and several international awards including the 2016 International Neural Network Society Young Investigator (INNS) Award, the Best Paper Award for Autonomous/Unmanned Vehicles at the 27th Army Science Conference in 2010, and the Best Researcher Award from the Automation and Robotics Research Institute in 2011. He has also served on various international program committees and has organized special sessions, workshops, and tutorials for several international conferences. He currently is an Associate Editor of: Automatica; IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems; IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems; IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence; Neurocomputing; Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications; and of Frontiers in Control Engineering-Adaptive, Robust and Fault Tolerant Control. He had also served as a Guest Editor for, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (Special issue on Learning from Imperfect Data for Industrial Automation); IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (Special issue on Reinforcement Learning Based Control: Data-Efficient and Resilient Methods); IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (Special issue on Industrial Artificial Intelligence for Smart Manufacturing); and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (Special issue on Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management).

Bio: Dr. Sayin is an Assistant Professor of the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department in Bilkent University, Turkey since September 2021. He leads the Games, Decisions & Networks Research Lab. He focuses on research challenges in socio-technical systems where humans and technological systems can engage with each other. His overarching research goal is to develop an understanding for the theoretical and algorithmic foundation of learning and autonomy in complex and dynamic systems to solve societal challenges with systematic guarantees.

Bio: Dr. André Teixeira is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden, where he leads the Secure Learning and Control Lab. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal, in 2009, and the Ph. D. degree in automatic control from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2014. From 2014 to 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Automatic Control, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. From October 2015 to August 2017, André was an Assistant Professor in Cybersecurity of Critical Infrastructures at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. From September 2017 to April 2021, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Uppsala University.

His research focuses on secure learning and control systems, particularly developing conceptual and modeling frameworks, methods, and tools for control engineers to analyze and design secure systems that safely interact with the physical world. His current research interests include security and privacy in intelligent control systems, distributed fault detection and isolation, distributed optimization, power systems, and networked dynamical systems. Dr. Teixeira was a recipient of the Best Student-Paper Award from the IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control in 2014, and an Honorable Mention for the Paul M. Frank Award at the IFAC SAFEPROCESS 2018. He was awarded a Starting Grant by the Swedish Research Council in 2018, and he is among the 20 young researchers in Sweden who received the Future Research Leaders 7 grant from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research in 2020. He was awarded the Lilly and Sven Thuréus prize in 2023 by The Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala. In 2023, he was appointed as a Wallenberg Academy Fellow by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.