ICON Control Reading Group

There are certain expectations from people joining the reading group-

1. Read: Read the paper (material) before the meeting (Making a small set of notes always helps.)

2. Show up: Be present at most of the meeting

3. Participate: Ask questions, give comments, share your ideas, can also criticize

Optional but preferred: Be a facilitator once in a while. This includes presenting and facilitating the discussion.

Before the semester begins we'll collect a pool of papers from everyone and the final list of papers and facilitators will be decided during the introductory meeting. The semester will be broadly divided into 3-4 phases, each phase covering one main topic. The first meeting of each phase will be dedicated to gaining a fundamental understanding, making it easier for people who may not be familiar with the area. The main of interest include but not limited to: 

• Optimal control and robust control

• Adaptive control

• Stochastic control

• Data-driven control and learning based methods

• Reinforcement learning & game theory 

• Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction

• Anything in the domain of controls, dynamics, and autonomy

(Note: Please avoid pure machine-learning papers as these might not be well suited for this group given it is a control reading group.)

We’ll have one facilitator per meeting. The facilitator will present 15-20 min of a brief overview of the paper following a 50-60 min discussion. 

Some ideas for the facilitator to think of:

• Provide an overview of the paper

• Look for interesting critiques of the paper 

• Contextualize the work in the broader literature

• Have some open questions