News & Insights

This month we are welcoming five new fellowship holders.

Congratulations to Sophie, who presented the paper "Stability Certificates for Receding Horizon Games"

The new hub for Computation, Learning, Optimization & Control. Taking place in Engelberg, Switzerland from 2-5th September 2025, the event offers inspiring plenary talks from world-class researchers, interactive poster sessions with a best poster award, engaging workshops, panel discussions and networking opportunities.

In addition to the 14 new people we welcomed in February, we have five new people joining us in March

In this episode Manfred Morari traces his journey from chemical process control to IMC, robust and predictive control, MPC, and lessons from a career spanning ETH Zürich, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Caltech and University of Pennsylvania. From theory to real-world impact, this episode is a must-listen for any control enthusiast!

We are happy to welcome the first of our fellowship winners from 2024's call. Our fellows will be arriving throughout the spring and staying with us for a period of up to six months.

Researcher Sophie Hall recently spoke to Richard Delevan on the Wicked Problems podcast about the need to democratise the algorithms in our lives. Give it a listen in the link below.

New episode! 🎙️ Today, we dive into Richard Bellman’s legacy as the father of dynamic programming. 🧠 From his early life in Brooklyn to Princeton, Los Alamos, RAND, and Stanford, we explore his monumental contributions to control theory, which set the stage for modern AI breakthroughs!

Congratulations to Ezzat Elokda who has been presented with the Young Author Award at the 5th IFAC Workshop on Cyber-Physical and Human Systems (CPHS) for his paper "To Travel Quickly or to Park Conveniently: Coupled Resource Allocations with Multi-Karma Economies"

Congratulations to Mahrokh Ghoddousi Boroujeni who has received the Outstanding Student Paper Award at IEEE CDC 2024 for her paper titled "A PAC-Bayesian Framework for Optimal Control with Stability Guarantees."

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.