EVENT    Prof. Melanie Zeilinger of ETH to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House

Date & Time:

Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST

Location:

Virtual Event

Description:

MERL is excited to announce the second keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
Prof. Melanie Zeilinger from ETH .

Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Zeilinger's talk is scheduled for 3:15pm - 3:45pm (EST).

Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021

Keynote Title: Control Meets Learning - On Performance, Safety and User Interaction

Abstract: With increasing sensing and communication capabilities, physical systems today are becoming one of the largest generators of data, making learning a central component of autonomous control systems. While this paradigm shift offers tremendous opportunities to address new levels of system complexity, variability and user interaction, it also raises fundamental questions of learning in a closed-loop dynamical control system. In this talk, I will present some of our recent results showing how even safety-critical systems can leverage the potential of data. I will first briefly present concepts for using learning for automatic controller design and for a new safety framework that can equip any learning-based controller with safety guarantees. The second part will then discuss how expert and user information can be utilized to optimize system performance, where I will particularly highlight an approach developed together with MERL for personalizing the motion planning in autonomous driving to the individual driving style of a passenger.

Speaker:

Prof. Melanie Zeilinger
ETH

Melanie Zeilinger is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, Switzerland where she leads the Intelligent Control Systems group. She received the Diploma degree in engineering cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree with honors in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2011. From 2011 to 2012 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany until 2015 and with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA, from 2012 to 2014. From 2018 to 2019 she was a professor at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her awards include the ETH medal for her PhD thesis, a Marie-Curie IO fellowship and an SNF Professorship grant. She is one of the organizers of the new Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC). Her research interests include safe learning-based control with applications to robotics and human-in-the-loop control.

External Link:

https://merl.com/events/voh21

Research Areas:

Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security