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The distinction between “convex” or “non-convex” optimization isn’t just a technicality. Convexity makes for calculations that can guarantee the best result in an automated process – here’s how.

Thank you to Control Systems Magazine who featured NCCR Automation as their Institute in Control.

Each year, NCCR Automation works with a number of our sister NCCRs to put on the bench2biz event, a two week workshop for pre-seed research ideas. Each year, carefully curated experts are invited to join to give advice and feedback, and as this initiative is run through the NCCRs, the organisers can give personalized, tailored feedback and coaching.

For 2022’s edition, NCCR Automation member Manos Barmpounakis took part and was coached by KTT officer Ben Sawicki. We asked Manos for his thoughts on the experience.

Apply by the end of September to spend a period of up to six months in an NCCR Automation lab.

Mathematician Yurii Nesterov is one of the main actors in the field of Convex Optimization, which is crucial for many applications in Automation. Thanks in part to his breakthroughs, that field is expanding to touch many other disciplines. He’s not as happy with that as you might think.

Humans have been trying to do more with less for a very long time. We’d like cars and planes that go further but use less fuel and have a smaller carbon footprint. We’d like food that is optimally nutritious but also affordable, and we’d like energy solutions for our house, cities and countries that are effective but also green and affordable.

The jury gave the following motivation: "The paper is being recognized for making a timely contribution to address noise-corrupted datasets in data-driven modeling and control through a principled statistical approach. The paper stands out for its completeness and high-impact potential in applications including predictive control and system identification".

In the changing energy landscape, flexibility is emerging as a new market – but how can it be properly traded when so much is uncertain? Julie Rousseau is creating a model to factor in the complexities of real life.

Congratulations to Varsha Behrunani for winning best poster award at the DTU PES summer school: Advances in OR and AI

Preparations for this year's RoboCup, which will take place in Bordeaux, France, are in full swing. This international robot soccer tournament brings together student teams from different countries to compete in 7-on-7 matches. In addition to the competition, RoboCup also serves as a robotics conference.

Many congratulations to Baiwei Guo for winning Best PhD Paper Award at ECC23.

Even as the possibilities of Internet of Things applications multiply, growth is being held back by energy challenges. One strategy is energy harvesting, but that comes with fundamental limitations. Naomi Stricker is working on solutions.

We hosted 100 people at ETH's conference centre in Monte Verita, Ticino, and what a week we had!

At a time when countries around the world are threatened with energy shortages, ETH Zurich and NCCR Automation researchers have developed a high-impact, low-cost software solution to improve resilience and efficiency. This innovative approach enables providers to make the most of decentralized energy resources such as photovoltaic systems through flexible, responsive, and data-driven operation.

While neural networks often achieve impressive performance, they sometimes fail to capture simple concepts that humans understand intuitively – a gap that may even put lives at risk. But can we transfer our human knowledge to neural networks to help them learn more meaningful solutions? NCCR Automation researcher Loris Di Natale has a plan to make sure automated machines don’t freeze us out.

Julie Rousseau is a PhD student at ETH Zurich and Empa looking at stabilising the energy grid.

Anna Scampicchio is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich who does theoretical research on why some systems behave the way they do.

Rahel Rickenbach is a PhD student at the Institute of Dynamic Systems and Control, at ETH Zurich.

Jelena Trisovic is a Ph.D. student at the ETH AI Center, she obtained an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from ETH Zürich and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computing from the University of Belgrade.

Alisa Rupenyan is a senior scientist at the Automatic Control Lab at ETH Zurich and Head of the Advanced Control and IoT group at Inspire, the technology transfer organization at ETH Zurich. She leads research projects in the intersection between process optimization, industrial control, and machine learning for applications strongly connected to manufacturing.

Clara Galimberti is a PhD student at EPFL. She received her degree in Electronic Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Argentina, in 2018. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning and control theory.

Maryam Kamgarpour leads the Sycamore lab at EPFL. Her theoretical research is motivated by control challenges arising in intelligent transportation networks, robotics, power grid systems and healthcare.

We are thrilled to announce that after a highly competitive round of financing calls for industry-academia projects, NCCR Automation has invested CHF 2.1 million in research into ten new, collaborative research projects. Projects will be hosted within an NCCR Automation lab and will continue with this funding for approximately two years, before being spun out in other formats.

Congratulations to NCCR Automation PI Silvia Mastellone who has been elected the board of governors of the IEEE Control System Society.

Loris Di Natale and Muhammad Zakwan are the perfect example of the interdisciplinarity fostered within NCCR Automation. They met during a project meeting and, after many months of exchange dedicated two full weeks of their time to drive their idea forward and to publish a paper. Several extensions of the initial idea are in the works so stay tuned for updates!

This time Alberto Padoan chats with Anuradha Annaswamy (MIT) about Adaptive Control and its exciting history, starting from the Brave Era to the audacious X15 tests and to modern intersections with RL.

Congratulations to NCCR PI Vasco Medici and his team for winning the Watt d'Or 2023 for their three year project that successfully demonstrated that an intelligently networked and controlled combination of electricity consumers and solar power producers can significantly increase self-sufficiency.

The NCCR members Luca Furieri and Maryam Kamgarpour have won the 2022 Best Paper Award in the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems for the paper "Sparsity Invariance for Convex Design of Distributed Controllers" by Luca Furieri, Yang Zheng, Antonis Papachristodoulou and Maryam Kamgarpour.

Congratulations to our PI Srdjan Capkun who has just been named IEEE Fellow for his contributions to wireless and systems security

In today's episode of the InControl podcast host Alberto Padoan talks to Jean-Jacques Slotine (Director of the Nonlinear Systems Laboratory at MIT and Distinguished Faculty at Google AI) about his inspiring journey through nonlinear and adaptive control, complex networks, optimization and machine learning

NCCR Automation provides junior researchers with the means for funding activities related to research or NCCR structure-related activities (Communication, Education, Equal Opportunity and KTT).

Congratulations to NCCR members Kaveh Razavi, Michele Marazzi and Melanie Zeilinger who, along with their teams, have been presented with "Golden Owl" awards for innovative teaching by the student association of ETH Zurich.

NCCR Automation is opening its first call for research projects in collaboration with industry partners.

Congratulations to PhD student Bahar Taskesen who has won the informs Optimization Society Student Paper Prize for her paper "Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport: Hardness, Regularization, and Numerical Solution".

Researchers of the NCCR Automation work together with partners from industry to contribute to a successful transition to a sustainable energy system.

Researchers of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation, ETH Zurich and Empa have developed novel control strategies for heating systems in buildings. In tests under real life settings, they managed to reduce energy use for heating by up to 49 percent.

We are happy to welcome three new PIs to NCCR Automation.

Last year, researchers discovered vulnerabilities in commonly used memory devices that potentially put users of any kind of computer at risk. So far, the efforts of vendors to implement security mechanisms inside the chips have been unsuccessful. Scientists of ETH Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation have now developed a mechanism by which the security risks are mitigated.