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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.

In this episode, our guest is Alessandro Chiuso. Alessandro is a Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padova. The episode covers several topics, including Alessandro’s research trajectory, his work in system identification and vision, and his passion for skiing.

ETH Zurich and NCCR Automation researchers have discovered a serious security vulnerability in computer hardware. The vulnerability, called "Retbleed," affects microprocessors from market leaders Intel and AMD. All commercially available operating systems worldwide that use these processors are affected. When computers execute special calculation steps to compute faster, they leave traces that hackers could abuse.

For years, there has been an imbalance at Swiss universities: students are comparatively less interested in mathematics, computer science, technical disciplines and natural sciences than in the humanities and social sciences. Various efforts have been made to counteract this development. The members of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation also contribute to this. For example, by visiting schools to introduce their research topics to pupils and to awaken their fascination for them.

At the end of June, the members and associates of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation met in Caux for their annual retreat. High above Lac Léman, participants from all seven institutions used the time to plan the future of the NCCR, develop educational programmes and to catch up with each other after last year's virtual event.

Research in automated control and machine learning done at the NCCR Automation helps to prepare industrial manufacturing for the future. Thus, manufacturing not only becomes more efficient and adaptable, but will also waste less material and require less energy, making the process more sustainable.

A group of 20 Bachelor students from the Chen-Ning Yang Scholars Programme based at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore travelled to Zurich to familiarize themselves with the research of NCCR Automation and to closely experience its experimental facilities at ETH Zurich.

Swissnex is the Swiss global network connecting Switzerland and the world in education, research and innovation. In May, a team of delegates from various worldwide locations visited the NCCR Automation at ETH Zurich to learn about its research areas and goals.

Prof. Kaveh Razavi, head of the Computer Security group and Principal Investigator at the NCCR Automation, wants to increase the security of computer hardware and microprocessors with a new approach. To this end, he has subsequently received an ERC Starting Grant. Due to Switzerland's exclusion from funding by the European Research Council ERC, the project is now being funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI.

Adapting to unexpected conditions is difficult for algorithms. Neither classical model based approaches nor modern machine learning methods that rely on data offer a convincing solution. Members of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation therefore suggest to combine the best of both.

Autonomous driving remains a major challenge in automation and control research. Members of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation work on innovative approaches to solve aspects of this challenge.

A two-part symposium hosted by ETH Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation brought together globally leading experts from the field of control theory to present their latest research and discuss what role their field can play in improving the interaction of algorithms with the real world.

NCCR Automation postdoc Alberto Padoan launched the first podcast on control theory and related topics. In it, thrilling guests discuss feedback, decision making, artificial intelligence, robotics and many more topics. The podcast is supported by the NCCR Automation.

David Shaw is an ethicist in the midst of a consortium filled with electrical engineers, computer scientists and control theorists. In this interview, he explains why automation and ethics cannot be separated and what he plans to work on in the context of the NCCR Automation.

In collaboration with the Swiss Association of Women Engineers (SVIN) and NCCR Digital Fabrication (DFAB), the NCCR Automation organised an interactive webinar on The Power of Networking to provide insights and tools for establishing a network effectively.

In his research on uncertain optimisation problems, Daniel Kuhn takes the role of a kind of ropedancer. In this way, he is contributing to the dependable automated future that the NCCR Automation is striving for. In this interview, the recent winner of the Humbolt Foundation award provides insights into his work.

A team of researchers of the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation investigated how social media influencers arise and communities form around them. Their results may lead to measures that mitigate the polarization that occurs on these platforms.