Speakers

Wenjiun Mei received the Bachelor of Science degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2011, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, in 2018.He is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University. Before joining Peking University, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. His researchinterests include the modeling, analysis, and control of network dynamical systems, including but not limited to social and economic networks, network games, group decision making, and evolutionary games. Dr. Mei is on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Mathematical Sociology.

Nilklas Karlsson is the Sr. Principal Research Scientist at Amazon Demand Side Platform (ADSP), where he helps to define and drive the science vision. His work includes systems and algorithms, design and analysis, theory and experiments. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics from Lund University in 1995, and the M.A. degree in Statistics and Applied Probability and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering (with a specialization in control theory, dynamic systems, and robotics) from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1997 and 2002, respectively. He also graduated from the Stanford Executive Program in 2017. He joined Evolution Robotics in Pasadena, California, in 2002, where he was the principal investigator of navigation and control algorithms. During his tenure at Evolution Robotics, he invented, among other things, the vSLAM technology, which is now used as the brain of the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner by iRobot. In 2005, he joined Advertising.com which by way of acquisitions and mergers later turned into Yahoo, where he was Vice President of Research and the Chief Scientist of the Demand Side Platforms; before joining Amazon. Niklas has published extensively and is the inventor of 50 issued patents in the areas of mobile autonomous robotics and online advertising; he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UCSB in 2015, in recognition of “outstanding application of systems engineering principles to the field of online advertising”, and the Master Inventor Award from Yahoo in 2017 (the highest technology/science recognition within the company). He is an IEEE fellow ‘for technical leadership to vSLAM and online advertising.’

Zifan Wang is a Ph.D. student affiliated with the Division of Decision and Control Systems (DCS) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, jointly working with Prof. Karl H. Johansson and Prof. Michael M. Zavlanos. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Harbin Institute of Technology. His research interests lie in online optimization, risk-averse learning, game theory, and learning-based control.

Stefania Ionescu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Automatic Control Laboratory (ETH Zurich). She has a background in Mathematics (BA from the University of Cambridge), Logic, Language, and Computation (MSc with distinction from the University of Amsterdam and ILLC), and Computer Science (PhD with distinction from the University of Zurich, Social Computing). During her PhD, she looked at the role of filter, search, sort, moderation, and recommendation tools in shaping our society. She aimed to both understand the effects of these tools on society and find what methods are generally effective in doing so. As such, her prior work spreads across various application domains (e.g., school choice, foster care, online dating, content-creator-centered platforms) and different areas of study (e.g., Algorithmic Fairness, Recommender Systems, AI, Social Networks, Game Theory, Matching Markets). From a methodological perspective, she primarily uses simulations and theoretical analysis.

Ming Cao received the bachelor’s and the master’s degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in 2007 from Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, all in electrical engineering. He worked as a Research Intern in 2006 with the Mathematical Sciences Department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA. From 2007 to 2008, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. He is currently a Professor of Systems and Control with the Engineering and Technology Institute (ENTEG) at the University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, where he started as an Assistant Professor in 2008. His research interests include autonomous agents and multiagent systems, decision-making dynamics, and complex networks. Dr. Cao was the recipient of the 2016 recipient of the European Control Award sponsored by the European Control Association (EUCA), and the 2017 and inaugural recipient of the Manfred Thoma medal from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). He is a Senior Editor for Systems and Control Letters, an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, and IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine.