News & Insights

This year’s Bench2Biz entrepreneurship workshop is just one of the channels being drawn on to support a promising energy management project. The founders are determined to enter the business world well prepared.

In a world underpinned by shared infrastructure, how do we protect the most vulnerable? Sophie Hall explains why she is focused on finding the theoretical tools to build systems that won’t leave anyone out in the cold.

In a previous post, Jared Miller and Niklas Schmid looked at what safety means in engineering. But how do different automation systems implement those specifications?

Timothy Asare and Goodnews Iduku, who will be among the first students to graduate from the joint Ashesi-ETH Master's in Mechatronic Engineering, visited us for two weeks earlier this autumn. Together, they are setting up an optimisation framework for a renewable energy grid at the Ashesi University campus, supervised by Varsha Behrunani and John Lygeros.

Safety is a crucial criterion in automation, but how can we actually define it? How can we verify whether we are safe? How can we make sure? NCCR members Jared Miller and Niklas Schmid take a closer look.

Mark your calendars! 🗓️ 2-5 September 2025 – Engelberg, Switzerland
Join us at the Swiss CLOCK Summit, a new event bringing together the top minds in Computation, Learning, Optimization, and Control.

Congratulations to NCCR Automation alumnus Gioele Zardini who has been awarded the ETH Doctoral Dissertation Award

Congratulations to NCCR Automation PI Daniel Kuhn for winning the INFORMS Optimization Society 2024 Farkas Prize

In a Master’s course at ETH, students are learning how to guide robotic decision making – and having their work graded by robots too.

We are happy to announce that seven new industry collaboration projects will start in Phase II, leading to shared work that will bring our research into society. You can read details of the funded projects below.

Munther Dahleh (MIT) takes us from L1 control theory to agile robotic manoeuvres, abstractions, cascaded failures in networks, markets, and the role of data and systems thinking in solving societal problems. Don’t miss out!

Congratulations to new PhD student Fabian Böhm who was awarded the EHG-Prize by "Energie- und Hochspannungstechnische Gesellschaft an der RWTH Aachen e.V. " for his Master's thesis "Laboratory Implementation of Curative Flexibility Deployments in Distribution Grids Using Online Feedback Optimization".

What are real challenges in control and automation that industry faces? What are advances in research that could help address them?

This year’s EnergyDataHackdays took place on 16-17th September in Brugg. The event is designed to bring together people to work on some of the biggest challenges to the energy sector, and see how automation can play a part.

Congratulations to Fabian Flürenbrock who won the award for his paper Model-Based Estimation of Ventricular Cerebrospinal Fluid Volume, authored by Fabian Flürenbrock, Simon Muntwiler, Leonie Korn, Marianne Schmid Daners, Melanie N. Zeilinger.

You've probably heard of reinforcement learning (or RL for short) if you've spent any time reading about technology or control theory, but what does it really mean? Let us explain.

“Digital twins” aren’t just for industry. Plugging details such as soil conditions and weather into an app could soon help farmers to get tailor-made crop management recommendations, cutting emissions while increasing yield.  

Through the lens of linear algebra, Bart De Moor guides us through the foundations of system identification to SVD applications, SVMs, quantum information, tensor algebra, and time series geometry —all the way to the very roots of system modelling!

You know what they say: if something sounds too good to be true… Except maybe in the case of the NCCR Automation fellowship. Don’t just take our word for it!

We talked with the visiting game theorist about fake news, selfish routing and the mutual relationship between computer science and other fields.

Investigating fundamental mathematical problems can generate results that deliver serious real-world benefits as well as taking research forward and helping other engineers. Dr. Mengshuo Jia’s work on linearity, and the resulting toolkit, is a great example.

Host Alberto Padoan meets Francesco Bullo (UC Santa Barbara) to explore his research journey, from early work in geometric control and robotics to robotic networks, cyber-physical systems, mathematical sociology, all the way to contraction theory and neural networks!

To scale up innovation, we need to bring research closer to real-world industrial needs. A new book by NCCR Automation researchers looks into how that can be achieved, and where the most exciting progress is right now.

The NCCR Automation has won the SNSF's Lighthouse Award in the Open Science category for its Data Kiosk, an app that provides simple, attractive, centralised access to public data.

Climate control is a major contributor to trains’ energy usage – which means it offers a major opportunity for savings. Ahmed Aboudonia is chasing that opportunity.

The IEEE CSS Swiss Chapter Young Author Best Journal Paper Award 2024 was presented during the NCCR Automation annual retreat in June 2024.

Calling Master's students, PhDc and Postdocs based outside Switzerland! We have just opened this year's call for applications for the NCCR Automation fellowship programme. If you are interested to spend a period of up to six months in one of our labs you can now send in your application.

On May 22, NCCR Automation hosted its first Industry & Academia Workshop on Control and Computation Methods to connect research and industry.

Everyone has heard of the so-called “Google Algorithm” and other social media algorithms used to find the most compelling content for each person. But what does that actually mean? How does it work and what is going on inside your computer?

What does stability mean in control theory, and what do shapes have to do with it? Grab a pen, an empty toilet roll and a pair of scissors: Wouter Jongeneel has something to teach you.

Congratulations to NCCR Automation PI Maryam Kamgarpour, who has been named winner of the European Control Award for 2024 by the European Control Association.

The first member event of Reallabor Sisslerfeld took place recently and brought together over 50 stakeholders from industry, science and regional organisations and political representatives from the municipalities and the canton of Aargau. The workshop aimed to set goals for collaboration and innovation in the field of sustainable urban development and to exchange initial concrete ideas.

Experiments by ETH Zurich and NCCR Automation computer security researchers showed that smartphones can be manipulated to allow the owner to ride Swiss trains for free. The researchers also highlighted ways of curbing such misuse.

Congratulations to NCCR Automation PI Kaveh Razavi for receiving the Jochen Lietke Young Researcher Award.

We enlisted model cars and alien robots to give a taste of the excitement of working with robotics to kids and teens from diverse backgrounds.

In this call, the NCCR Automation is looking to fund industry collaboration and technology transfer projects that have a very concrete impact on Swiss industry and society.

This publication is a collaboration between the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) and the National Center of Competence in Research Automation (NCCR Automation). It aims to provide small and medium-sized distribution grid operators, energy supply companies and decision-makers in Switzerland an overview of the upcoming changes in the energy system. The publication also aims to highlight the resulting opportunities, innovative technologies, possible solutions and new business areas to ensure a reliable and profitable energy supply by 2050.

Today we embark on a voyage through EDA history with the legendary Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli! 🚀 From classical studies to revolutionizing electronic design, we cover SPICE, the iconic Intel x386, and the genesis of multibillion-dollar Cadence and Synopsis!

A big idea isn’t enough – academics with entrepreneurial goals often feel lost when they try to turn their ideas into products. The bench2biz workshops exist to show you the way to success.

The most everyday problems are sometimes the most resistant to efficient solutions. Dual sourcing inventory control is an example: it’s harder than you might think to balance speedy delivery against cost. But machine learning can help.