Panelists

Antonella Ferrara received the M.Sc. degree (Cum Laude and printing honours) in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Genoa, Italy, in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Since 2005, she has been Full Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Pavia, Italy. Her research activities are mainly in the area of nonlinear control, with a special emphasis on control of uncertain systems via sliding modes generation, and application to road traffic, automotive systems, electro-mobility, robotics, and power systems. She is author and co-author of more than 450 publications including more than 160 journal papers, 2 monographs (published by Springer Nature and SIAM, respectively) and one edited book (IET). She was/is Principal Investigator and National Coordinator in several projects funded by the European Union and by the Italian Ministry for University and Research. She is currently serving as Associate Editor of Automatica, and Senior Editor of the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems. She served as Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, as well as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Control Systems Magazine and International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. Antonella Ferrara is the Chair of the EUCA Conference Editorial Board and the Director of Operations of the IEEE Control Systems Society. She is a member of the IEEE TC on Automotive Control, IEEE TC on Smart Cities, IEEE TC on Variable Structure Systems, IFAC TC on Nonlinear Control Systems, IFAC TC on Transportation Systems, and IFAC Technical Committee on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles. She is also serving as the Vice-Chair for Industry of the IFAC TC on Nonlinear Control Systems (2024-2026) and is a member of the IFAC Industry Board. She is also a member of the IFAC Conference Board, by virtue of her appointment as one of the two Program Chairs of the 24th IFAC Word Congress to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2029. Among several awards, she was a co-recipient of the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. She is a Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of IFAC.

M. Umar B. Niazi received his Ph.D. in Automatic Control Engineering from Grenoble INP, Université Grenoble Alpes (France), in 2021. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from COMSATS University (Pakistan) and Bilkent University (Turkey). He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Networked Control Systems group in the Division of Decision and Control Systems at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). Dr. Niazi is a Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow for the period 2022-2025. He was a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at the European Control Conference (ECC) in 2019. He also serves as a Chair of the NextCOM committee for students and early career researchers in the IEEE Control Systems Society.

Thomas Parisini received the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 1993 from the University of Genoa. Prior to his position at Imperial College, he was with Politecnico di Milano. He is a Deputy Director of the KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence, University of Cyprus. Since 2001 he is also Danieli Endowed Chair of Automation Engineering with University of Trieste. In 2009-2012 he was Deputy Rector of University of Trieste. In 2023 he received from the Italian President of the Republic the Knighthood of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for scientific achievements abroad. In 2018 he received an Honorary Doctorate from University of Aalborg, Denmark. He holds a "Scholar-in-Residence" visiting position at Digital Futures-KTH, Stockholm, Sweden. He authored or co-authored a research monograph in the Communication and Control Series, Springer Nature, and over 400 research papers in archival journals, book chapters, and international conference proceedings. Prof Thomas Parisini is world leader in the analysis and design of fault-diagnosis and cyber-attack detection in nonlinear distrubuted control systems and their application to large-scale networked systems such as critical infrastructures. He is also world leader in distributed estimation and use of functional approximation for optimal control of nonlinear stochastic systems and lately in the development of digital twins in cyber-physical systems and in the process industry, especially in the metal processing with a track record of success stories on actual steel and aluminum rolling mills in the United States. Prof Parisini is a co-recipient of the IFAC Best Application Paper Prize of the Journal of Process Control, Elsevier, for the three-year period 2011-2013 and of the 2004 Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks. He is also a recipient of the 2007 IEEE Distinguished Member Award. In 2016, he was awarded as Principal Investigator at Imperial of the H2020 European Union flagship Teaming Project KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence led by University of Cyprus with a budget of over 40 MEuro. He has served as the 2021-2022 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society and during 2009-2016 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. on Control Systems Technology. Since 2017, he is Editor for Control Applications of Automatica and since 2018 he is the Editor in Chief of the European Journal of Control. Among other activities, he was the Program Chair of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and General Co-Chair of the 2013 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Prof. Parisini is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IFAC.

Jana Tumova is Associate professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She received PhD in computer science from Masaryk University and was awarded ACCESS postdoctoral fellowship at KTH in 2013. She was also a visiting researcher at MIT, Boston University, and Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. Her research interests include formal methods applied in decision making, motion planning, and control of autonomous systems. Currently, she serves as an associate editor for IEEE RA-L, ICRA, and an Area Chair for RSS. Among other projects, she is a recipient of a Swedish Research Council Starting Grant to explore compositional planning for multi-agent systems under temporal logic goals and a WASP NEST project focusing on design of correct-by-design and socially acceptable autonomous systems. She received Early Career Spotlight Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2021.  

Maria Elena Valcher is Professor of Control Theory at the University of Padova since 2005. She is the author of approximately 95 journal papers, 18 book chapters, 110 conference papers and 3 textbooks. She has been an active volunteer for IEEE CSS, IEEE, IFAC and EUCA since 1999. She is the Founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Control Systems Letters (2017-) and one of the co-Editors in Chief of Frontiers and Trends in Systems and Control (2023-). She was Program Chair of IEEE CDC 2012 and co-General Chair of IEEE CDC 2022. She was the 2015 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society and is the current President of EUCA (2024-2025). She received the 2011 IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award. She is an IEEE Fellow since 2012 and an IFAC Fellow (Class 2020-2023).