News & Insights
22-04-2025
Our latest fact sheet, co-authored with SATW, shows application cases for AI.
16-04-2025
What do Alpiq, GWF, Hamilton Medical, VAT, and Zurich Insurance have in common? A deep interest in control and optimisation! We were happy to host them at the third iteration of our Workshop on Control and Computational Methods together with researchers from ETH, EPFL, Empa, ZHAW, FHNW, OST, and Inspire AG.
16-04-2025
NCCR Automation offers travel grants for eligible researchers to attend and present their research at CLOCK 2025.
We invite applications from master’s students, PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members from Universities in geographical regions that are under-represented in the Control and Automation community. This is a fantastic chance to engage with experts in the field, present your work in the poster session, and gain insights into the latest research developments.
We invite applications from master’s students, PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members from Universities in geographical regions that are under-represented in the Control and Automation community. This is a fantastic chance to engage with experts in the field, present your work in the poster session, and gain insights into the latest research developments.
15-04-2025
This time host Alberto Padoan is talking to Miroslav Krstić (UC San Diego) about nonlinear adaptive control, PDEs, delays, extremum seeking, safety and neural operators for control.
08-04-2025
How do you boil down years of work to a three minute talk? Watch Pengbo Zhu summarise her thesis in 180 seconds and see how she is hoping to make your taxi rides better.
07-04-2025
Apply now for the opportunity to spend up to six months in an NCCR Automation lab.
01-04-2025
This month we are welcoming five new fellowship holders.
28-03-2025
Congratulations to Sophie, who presented the paper "Stability Certificates for Receding Horizon Games"
24-03-2025
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.
03-03-2025
In addition to the 14 new people we welcomed in February, we have five new people joining us in March
24-02-2025
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!
10-02-2025
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.
04-02-2025
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.
20-01-2025
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!
13-01-2025
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"
07-01-2025
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."
19-12-2024
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.
18-12-2024
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.
16-12-2024
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?
11-12-2024
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.
10-12-2024
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.
05-12-2024
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.
Join us at the Swiss CLOCK Summit, a new event bringing together the top minds in Computation, Learning, Optimization, and Control.
02-12-2024
Congratulations to NCCR Automation alumnus Gioele Zardini who has been awarded the ETH Doctoral Dissertation Award
14-11-2024
Congratulations to NCCR Automation PI Daniel Kuhn for winning the INFORMS Optimization Society 2024 Farkas Prize
24-10-2024
In a Master’s course at ETH, students are learning how to guide robotic decision making – and having their work graded by robots too.
22-10-2024
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.
17-10-2024
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!
30-09-2024
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".
26-09-2024
What are real challenges in control and automation that industry faces? What are advances in research that could help address them?
26-09-2024
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.
13-09-2024
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.
05-09-2024
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.
02-09-2024
“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.
21-08-2024
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!
29-07-2024
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!
23-07-2024
We talked with the visiting game theorist about fake news, selfish routing and the mutual relationship between computer science and other fields.
18-07-2024
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.
15-07-2024
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!
08-07-2024
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.
01-07-2024
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.