News & Insights

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.

Fused deposition modelling is a genuinely transformative technology, but unreliable and imprecise results mean there is still a huge gap between its potential and what it actually delivers. Xavier Guidetti is using feedback and optimisation to close that gap.

Naomi Ehrich Leonard, Part II: Unveiling the Dynamics of Collective Decision-Making from Flocking Starlings to Desert Ants, Political Polarization, and the Creative Dance Between Arts and Control Theory.

NCCR Automation researchers from the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich and the electricity supplier AEW Energie AG have won the 2024 Watt d’Or award in the Energy Technologies category. Their algorithm, which was implemented at AEW Energie, makes it possible to optimise electricity grid operations.

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.

This serious condition affects sufferers from babies to the elderly, and yet the treatment hasn’t changed in 70 years. We’re working on that.

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"

Common traffic mitigation solutions have a problem: they’re intrinsically unfair. Charging for access shifts the burden of congestion to those less able to pay for it. Our researchers may have found a way around this issue.

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.

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!