Mario Sznaier

Northeastern University
Dennis Picard Trustee Professor 
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Designing provably safe controllers from partial information

In this talk we will cover recent results on designing provably safe data driven controllers for non-linear systems. In the first part of the talk we will show that, for continuous time systems, tractable solutions can be obtained by exploiting a combination of density functions and duality. Further, these controllers can be made robust to process noise during execution. In the second part of the talk, we will discuss the prospects to extend these results to discrete time systems. We will conclude the talk by illustrating the challenges entailed in “model agnostic” data driven control and show that completely model agnostic data driven control methods can fail to stabilize simple systems. This highlights the need for design methods that are rooted in systems theory, even if models are a-priori unavailable and must be inferred from the data.

Mario Sznaier received the Ingeniero Electronico and Ingeniero en Sistemas de Computacion degrees from the Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay and the MSEE and Ph.D degrees from the University of Washington. From 1991 to 1993 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Central Florida. In 1993 he joined the Pennsylvania State University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1997 and to Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2001. In July 2006 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, as the Dennis Picard Trustee Professor. He has also held visiting appointments at the California Institute of Technology in 1990 and 2000 and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Penn State. His research interest include dynamics-enabled machine learning, robust control, control oriented identification, semi-algebraic optimization, and dynamic computer vision. He serves as Associate Editor for the journal Automatica, Editor in Chief for the Section on AI and Machine Learning Control of the journal Frontiers in Control Engineering, and Chair of IFAC’s Technical Committee on Robust Control. Dr. Sznaier is an IEEE Fellow and received the IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Member Award.