Teaching Activities
One of the major goals that I seek to achieve in all my professional experiences is that of creating a stimulating environment with the right conditions for undergraduate and graduate students to develop their skills. Driven by this, I have been teaching both fundamental and specialized units to both undergraduate and graduate students, often designing and teaching brand new units (see below for a list of taught modules). I always found teaching a particularly rewarding and stimulating experience and I am also strongly convinced that good teaching stems from high quality research. This is why, within my modules, I inform students of pressing open problems related to the topics we are studying, showing how we are tackling these challenges through research.
My approach. I introduce theoretical concepts by means of motivating examples and I use demonstrations to illustrate the theory. This approach is underpinned by my belief that students should grasp the concepts behind the technicalities. As a result, I design my lectures in a way that emphasises ideas over the technical details. Once I assess the understanding of the main ideas, I then further engage students by presenting them analysis and design problems from applications with which they are familiar. It is through these applications that I guide students through the more technical aspects, stressing the impact of the techniques on the solution. Consequently, my lectures have a high degree of interaction with students and this is facilitated by using a combination of course activities, use of multimedia equipment and hands-on demonstrations. My approach to assessment reflects the teaching style and, whenever possible, students are assessed based on a project developed throughout the course. By developing a project, I challenge students to: (i) deep dive into the technical details of the tools we are studying; (ii) implement the theory; (iii) develop the sensibility to autonomously verify their findings. As an additional benefit, students also gain time-management and soft skills that are so important nowadays.
Feedback from students. Students typically enjoy the classes I teach and indeed I consistently obtain high scores from students’ feedback. They particularly enjoy the teaching style, the mix between theory and applications, the fact that I use a computer in class to illustrate computational aspects of the algorithms and the assessment strategy which consists of developing a project throughout the module. Some of the feedback include:
"Projects were helpful to understand concepts. Teaching was helpful in understanding."
"Projects were interesting and engaging."
"Best aspects that learned learning: lectures and labs"
"The lecturer was very good at explaining concepts in a clear and engaging manner. I also really liked how at the beginning of each lecture we would quickly go over what was covered in the last lecture. It helped my understanding well. I also enjoyed how this module was 100% Continuous Assessment as it helped me to understand the work I was doing as opposed to just learning material for an exam."
"Giovanni Russo was perhaps the best lecturer I have ever had. Course material was very well layed out. Continual assessment was of a challenging but doable nature, encouraging students to go beyond requirements, with prompt feedback on said assignments."
"Thoroughly enjoyed all aspects. Lab introductions were excellent as I had never used MATLAB previously. I was quite lost at the beginning but once we put the ideas into practice it all came together."
Teaching experience
At the undergraduate level, I have been teaching the full portfolio of signals and systems as well as control design modules. These latter set of modules cover both frequency domain and state space approaches as well as linear/nonlinear control together with the control of complex systems. I am proud of being the founder of the new Data-driven control systems design module, which exposes students to a different paradigm for the design of control systems based solely on the use of data rather than models. At the graduate level, I have been teaching both optimization courses tailored towards engineers and advanced learning/control courses.
2021 - present: module coordinator and lecturer for the module "Data-driven control systems design" (University of Salerno). I am proud to be the founder of this first-of-a-kind module (in English) addressed to Master students in Information Engineering in their final year of studies. The module exposes students to the beautiful discipline of data-driven control. Throughout the module several techniques to control systems directly from the data are presented: the module foresees a blend of lectures are labs to highlight how the rigorous methodology we develop has an impact on the design of real-world control systems. As a by-product of the teaching approach, learning algorithms are also introduced through the lenses of stochastic optimal control. Students are assessed based on a project developed throughout the module where they design and implement data-driven control algorithms for realistic test cases from robotics, biology and autonomous systems applications.
2021 - present: module coordinator and lecturer for the module "Complements of automatic control and robotics" (University of Salerno). I am the founder of this module, which is addressed to Master students in Information Engineering in their final year of studies. The module exposes students to: (i) nonlinear and optimal control theory; (ii) the control of complex systems. The module blends lectures, within which several control algorithms are rigorously presented, and labs that serve to showcase (and validate) the effectiveness of the algorithms onto realistic testbeds. Students are assessed based on a project developed throughout the module where they design and implement nonlinear/optimal/distributed control algorithms for test cases from robotics, biology and autonomous systems applications.
2020 - present: module coordinator and lecturer for the module "Optimization techniques" (University of Salerno). This is an advanced module (in English) for PhD students in Information Engineering. Topics include: convex optimization, duality theory, integer programming, algorithmic aspects. The syllabus is updated every year to give students insights on the latest research developments in optimization with a focus on control and learning.
2020 - present: module coordinator and lecturer for the module "Fundamentals of Automatic Control" (University of Salerno). This module is for Bachelor students and equips students with the basic tools to: (i) analyze linear and nonlinear dynamical systems; (ii) design linear control systems (the module is in Italian). Both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamical systems are considered.
2020 - 2021: module coordinator and co-lecturer for the module "Control Systems Design" (University of Salerno). This is an advanced module (in English) for Master students in Information Engineering. The module is project-based: students design advanced control systems for robotics, autonomous and industrial automation applications.
2019 - 2020: module coordinator and lecturer for "EEEN40580 - Optimisation Techniques for Engineers" (University College Dublin). The module, designed for Master students, is focused on the methodological and computational aspects enabling the formulation and resolution of real-world optimization problems arising in engineering and beyond.
2018 - 2020: module coordinator and lecturer for "EEEN30110 – Signals and Systems" (University College Dublin). This is a classic signals and systems module, which is taught for both Bachelor and Master students.
2016 - 2019: module co-founder and co-lecturer for "EEEN40590 – Distributed Optimisation and Control over Graphs" (University College Dublin). The module, designed for Master students, is focused on the design of distributed control and optimization algorithms to solve large-scale engineering problems. I founded this module while at IBM Research and, as a results, students were also exposed to some of our latest Industrial research.