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This time host Alberto Padoan talks to Naomi Leonard (Princeton University) about how bees choose their next nest site, how starlings maintain formations to escape predators, and the curious connection between dancing and control theory. 🐝 🐥 💃 🕺

New episode alert!🎙️Part II of our fascinating journey with Tryphon Georgiou is live! 🚀 This episode takes you beyond robustness and feedback systems, exploring the dazzling realms of quantum mechanics, turbulence, optimal transport, and elusive “aha moments”! 🌐✨

Last week NCCR Automation members Saverio Bolognani and Nicolas Lanzetti went to the Kantonsschule Zürcher Unterland in Bülach with the SATW TechDays.

Cette maladie grave touche les personnes âgées comme les bébés, et pourtant le traitement n'a pas changé depuis 70 ans. Nous y travaillons.

Keep up to date with the NomadZ robotic football team here, where team member Nicole Damblon tells us how their 2023 has gone.

Congratulations to two NCCR Automation researchers who have won SNSF Swiss National Science Foundation grants this week. Niao He who won a starting grant for her project “Optimization for Modern Reinforcement Learning: from Principles to Scalability” and Mengshuo Jia who won for a project on rethinking power system computation from a fundamental and non-traditional perspective.

As a journal editor and award-winning researcher, Francis Bach has his finger on the pulse of AI. He talked to us about exciting new findings, how to spread ideas, and why convexity isn’t always the right goal.

New episode of the inControl podcast! At our recent NCCR Symposium host Alberto Padoan grabbed Tryphon Georgiou (UC Irvine) for a two part chat on modeling, robustness and fundamental limitations of feedback systems. This episode covers marathons, interpolation problems, metrics and the interplay between feedback and causality.

Congratulations to Wouter Jongeneel who has won the 2023 INFORMS Optimization Society Award for his paper "Small Errors in Random Zeroth-Order Optimization are Imaginary" (co-authored with Man-Chung Yue and Daniel Kuhn)

Congratulations to Paolo Gherardo Carlet, Andrea Favato, Saverio Bolognani and Florian Dorfler for winning the Transactions on Power Electronics (TPEL) Prize Paper Award for their paper "Data-Driven Continuous-Set Predictive Current Control for Synchronous Motor Drives"

Les solutions courantes de réduction du trafic routier ont un problème : elles sont intrinsèquement injustes. Le fait de faire payer l'accès déplace la charge de la congestion vers ceux qui sont moins en mesure de la payer. Nos chercheurs ont peut-être trouvé un moyen de contourner ce problème.

On October 24, 2023, the founding meeting of the "Reallabor Sisslerfeld" took place in Münchwilen. The "Verein" (association) will concentrate on creating a living lab for energy and mobility topics. Among those present at the ceremony were Dieter Egli, Cantonal Government Councillor of Aargau and the President of ETH Zurich, Joël Mesot, as well as other high-ranking representatives from politics, administration, research and industry.

We're back with Season 2! 🎉 In our first episode, Davide Scaramuzza from University of Zurich takes us on a journey through magic, autonomous vision-based navigation, agile drone racing, and event-based cameras. 🤖 Ready for takeoff?

The Third Champéry Power Conference on 4-9 February 2024 is organized by the Institute of Sustainable Energy at the School of Engineering of Valais and the Automatic Control Laboratory of the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich. NCCR Automation are proud to sponsor this event.

In the last week of September we welcomed 80 people to the NCCR Symposium on Complex Interconnected Systems and decision making in measure spaces. This is how it went...

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.

Le mathématicien Yurii Nesterov est l'un des principaux acteurs dans le domaine de l'optimisation convexe, qui est cruciale pour de nombreuses applications dans le domaine de l'automation. Grâce en partie à ses découvertes, ce domaine s'étend à de nombreuses autres disciplines. Il n'en est pas aussi satisfait qu'on pourrait le penser.

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".

Dans un paysage énergétique en pleine mutation, la flexibilité apparaît comme un nouveau marché. Mais comment l'échanger correctement quand tant de choses sont incertaines ? Julie Rousseau crée un modèle qui tient compte des complexités de la vie réelle.

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.

Alors que les possibilités d'applications de l'internet des objets se multiplient, leur croissance est freinée par des problèmes d'énergie. L'une des stratégies consiste à récolter de l'énergie, mais cela s'accompagne de limitations fondamentales. Naomi Stricker travaille sur des solutions.

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

Alors que les pays du monde entier sont menacés de pénurie d'énergie, les chercheurs de l'ETH Zurich et du PRN Automation ont développé une solution logicielle à fort impact et à faible coût pour améliorer la résilience et l'efficacité du réseau énergétique. Cette approche innovante permet aux fournisseurs de tirer le meilleur parti des ressources énergétiques décentralisées telles que les systèmes photovoltaïques grâce à un fonctionnement flexible, réactif et axé sur les données.

Si les réseaux neuronaux atteignent souvent des performances impressionnantes, ils ne parviennent pas toujours à saisir des concepts simples que les humains comprennent intuitivement - une lacune qui peut même mettre des vies en danger. Mais pouvons-nous transférer nos connaissances humaines aux réseaux neuronaux pour les aider à apprendre des solutions plus significatives ? Loris Di Natale, chercheur au PRN Automation, a un plan pour s'assurer que les machines automatisées ne nous excluent pas.

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.