Home
Giovanni Russo (SMIEEE ’19) is, since February 2020, an Associate Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Salerno (Italy). He obtained his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Naples Federico II under the supervision of Prof. M. di Bernardo. Soon after his Ph.D., motivated by the desire of challenging himself against real-world applications, he accepted a job offer from Ansaldo STS (now Hitachi STS) and was the lead system engineer of the Honolulu Rail Transport Project. Upon completion of the system-level design of the HRTP, in Nov. 2015, he joined IBM Research in Dublin, Ireland. Within IBM, he has been a Research Staff Member in Optimization, Control and Decision Science. His last position before joining University of Salerno has been with University College Dublin, where he has been a Lecturer in cyber-physical systems from September 2018 to February 2020. His main research interests are at the intersection of control theory, applied mathematics, cyber-physical (CPS) networked systems and information theory. His research involves both theoretical and applied aspects, with example applications including: distributed control of agents, data-driven optimal control, the design of human-in-the-loop control systems, large scale testing and validation of CPSs. Read More
New students Theses projects available! See here for the most updated list and contact me if interested!
A summary of current and recent roles
Associate Editor IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems
Associate Editor IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: regular papers
Local Organizing Committee European Control Conference 2019
A personal statement
My research is the result of a very specific personal and professional journey that I decided to follow. I strongly believe that truly disruptive research comes from cross- fertilization of different disciplines and I worked hard to contaminate my original control-theoretical background with other viewpoints. I have always known that, to achieve my vision of an interdisciplinary research where theory and applications feed each other, I needed to challenge myself with complex real-world projects. This is why, soon after my PhD, even if I received a permanent Lectureship offer, I left Academia for Industry. I am proud that, within Industry, I was able to go out of my comfort zone, first leading the design of a first-of-a-kind transportation system and then contributing to shape the future of ICT and transportation within the prestigious IBM Research. It is this melting pot of experiences and cultures that has generated most of the research ideas contained in this website.
News
May 2023. Glad to be appoinged as member of the Board of the PhD in Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity at the School for Advanced Studies in Naples!
May/June 2023. Been traveling and giving seminars at ETH and Padua, get in touch if interested in the slides!
October 2022. Will be serving as AE for the IFAC World Congress 2023 (IFAC TC 1.5 - networked systems)!
July 2022. Honored to be part of the PhD defence Committee for Bikash Adhikari, supervised by Constantin Morarescu and Elena Panteley!
December 2021. Check out the videos and talks for the two invited sessions we organized at the CDC 2021! See https://tinyurl.com/2p94u26n and https://tinyurl.com/2vbz2txc!
September 2021. Congrats to Shihao Xie who was awarded the IEEE CSS student funding support to attend CDC 2021!
July 2021. Will be giving a seminar at the UCSB Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation. The talk will be on our recent work related to contraction theory for dynamical equations on time scales. See here for the paper.
June 2021. Sharing some results on noise-induced phenomena in complex networks with an invited talk at the mini-symposium "Effects of stochasticity and heterogeneity on networks' synchronization properties" within the Society for Mathematical Biology 2021 Annual Meeting. Find out more here
June 2021. Truly excited to give a series of seminars on data-driven control and decision-making under uncertainty at the School for Advanced Studies in Naples. Get in touch for slides/seminars material
May 2021. Glad of the minisymposium "Data-Driven Analysis and Control of Dynamical Systems" (co-organized with Pietro Tesi). Check out our amazing line-up of speakers (Part 1: https://tinyurl.com/4rryyuuc, Part 2: https://tinyurl.com/ucdeyy47)
May 2021. Our work on the crowdsourcing of behaviors for autonomous agents will be presented at the 2021 American Control Conference. Check it out here: https://tinyurl.com/2j7x57jf
April 2021. Glad to become a member of the Board of Directors of the Information Engineering Ph.D. program at University of Salerno!
March 2021. Our work on Covid-19 will be also showcased at the Matlab World Expo (see the paper for the gitub repo containing our code). There, we will share the numerical aspects of our studies and how we used Matlab to devise our results!
February 2021. Glad to be presenting our work on the crowdsourcing of behaviors for autonomous agents at the 2021 American Control Conference! If you curious on how we could design agents that are able to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by crowdsourcing, check out our preprint here (the paper has been also accepted on the IEEE Control Systems Letters - see here for the published version)
December 2020. Big congrats to Shihao Xie for the acceptance of his first scientific paper on the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems! This work came out from an experimental observation: for very large scale systems, designing protocols that guarantee stability of the network system is sometimes not enough...check it out here (or here for a preprint).
November 2020. We have a new graduate student on board, welcome Émiland Garrabé.
October 2020. Glad to be interviewed in relation to our COVID-19 work, where we discuss how control theory can give insights on how this epidemic could be mitigated!
October 2020. Our paper "A network model of Italy shows that intermittent regional strategies can alleviate the COVID-19 epidemic" has been published on Nature Communications! See the "Broader dissemination" section below for some news coverage of our research.
September 2020. Glad to present our research on noise induced collective phenomena in complex networks at the "Multiscale Analysis of Dynamical Processes on Networks". The event is organized within NetSci 2020, the flagship conference of the Network Science Society.
August 2020. Big congrats to Meghana Rathi for presenting her first scientific paper! This work came out from when she was working towards her Master within my group at UCD! See more about the MPC-augmented RL algorithm on which she worked here.
July 2020. We have new projects available for talented students interested in our research! To find out more see here.
July 2020. So glad we received the NovaUCD award for our consultancy work with Toyota. You can see here the news covering the (virtual!) ceremony. See also here for a video highlighting our work!
May 2020. How can we restart our Country, so heavily affected by Covid-19? Check out our new study here, where we use tools from nonlinear dynamics, control and networks to answer this question!
April 2020. We were happy to share our research at the IEEE-CSS Italy Workshop on Modeling and Control of the COVID-19 Outbreak! Our contribution has been on the network modeling and control of COVID-19 epidemic in Italy! See here for a video of the presentation.
March 2020. We won the 2019 NovaUCD Innovation Award for consultancy! See here for info about the event.
January 2020. I will be panellist at the event organized by ConsultUCD The use of AI for Security – solution or threat? Looking forward for interesting conversations!
January 2020. I have been appointed Associate Professor in Automatic Control at the University of Salerno!
November 2019. I will be giving an invited talk within the 2019 SEMICON in Munich, 12-14. Glad to share our results on data-driven control and its application to advanced manufacturing!
November 2019. I am proud that our consultancy work with Toyota Ireland made it as a finalist for the Knowledge Transfer Ireland award. See the link for a video illustrating the key features of our work and here to download our study!
June 2019. Looking forward to give my invited talk at the 14th SICC International Tutorial Workshop. This time we will present some of our more application-oriented results on CPSs with humans in the loop!
June 2019. Join us at the Workshop “Analytics for the Sharing Economy: Mathematics, Engineering and Business Perspectives” I joint organized with Dr. E. Crisostomi (University of Pisa), Dr. F. Haeusler (Moovel Group, Germania), Dr. B. Ghaddar and J. Naoum-Sawaya (Ivey Business School, Canada), Prof. R. Shorten (Imperial College London)!
June 2019. It has been an honor to be invited by Huawei to given a plenary talk at the 2019 Huawei International Workshop. Lots of stimulating interactions around the decision-making strategies we are developing!
June 2019. We are organizing two sessions at the 2019 European Control Conference: “Control and Optimization Methods for Closed Loop AI Systems” with Dr. Simonetto (IBM Research) and “Networked Control Methods for Connected and Automated Vehicles” with Dr. B. Besseling (University of Groningen), Dr. J. Monteil (IBM Research) and Dr. S. Knorn (Uppsala University)!
June 2019. I will be giving an invited talk and will be part of the panel within the event Transition to Industry from Academia organized by Eaton Corporation in Ireland.
May 2019. Can we use decision-making strategies to increase security of distributed CPSs? This is the key question I will address with my invited plenary talk at the UCD Cybersecurity Research Colloquium in Dublin.
May 2019. Join us at the mini-symposium "Collective Behaviors in Complex Systems with Noise and Delays" I organized with Prof. N. Abaid (Virginia Tech) at the 2019 SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems!
April 2019. I have been elevated to the rank of IEEE Senior Member!
June 2018. I have been one of the organizers of the International Event: “ENABLE-S3 Second General Assembly Meeting in Dublin, at our IBM Research Lab. We shared our latest findings within the H2020 project ENABLE-S3. See here for a video of the event!
July 2017. Glad to give an invited talk at the 2017 International Workshop on Control Engineering and Synthetic Biology in London. The talk discusses our results on the synchronization of biochemical systems via contraction.
July 2017. Glad to give an invited talk at the Workshop on Incremental Methods in Control in Lyon. The talk surveys our recent results on the use of contraction theory to study networked systems.
December 2016. Serving as Track Chair for Control Systems, Mechatronics and Robotics Track of the 23rd International Conference on Electronics, Circuits and Systems (2016).
November 2016. Giving an invited plenary talk at the IEEE International Workshop on Complex Systems and Network in Atlanta. The talk will present some new results on noise-induced phenomena in complex systems.
October 2016. Giving an invited lecture at the prestigious 23rd World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Join us for the special session Automated Transport Systems: How Far We Are?
Broader dissemination...
Our recent work on the Covid-19 epidemics has been recently covered within Italian newspapers. See here to get a glimpse of what we are doing on this topic, which is so important for us as a Society. See also the Design portfolio to see the tools we are developing.
Over the years, my research has been highlighted by several mass media. This includes:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/04/20190423-ucdc.html
http://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/02/a-cognitive-in-car-companion-to-help-us-enjoy-the- journey/
http://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/08/hacking-an-e-bike/
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/innovation/ibm-and-ucd-in-drive-to-perfect-intelligent-in-car- assistant-1.2966857
Videos are a nice way to share our research. See the videos below for a high-level view of our research on connected and autonomous vehicles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6VyHN4PVcY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCX2GLn1pnM&t=6s
I have been also interviewed about our work on the mitigation of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy, check out the radio interview here.