Associate Professor at the University of Oxford
and Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh's College
Brief Biography
I am an Associate Professor of engineering sciences at the University of Oxford since June, 2025. My research focuses on learning and optimal control for distributed decision-making and large-scale safety critical applications.
Previously, I have been a Principal Investigator at EPF Lausanne since 2023, a postdoctoral researcher at EPF Lausanne since 2021, and I have received the Ph.D. degree in 2020 from ETH – Zurich in the Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA).
I was a recipient of the SNSF Ambizione career grant in 2022. My papers have been awarded the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Best Paper Award in 2022, the European Control Conference Best Paper Award (finalist) in 2019, and the American Control Conference O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award in 2018.
Research
Below you will find a few slides that describe my recent research work.
Brief overview of selected contributions
Neural network control with stability guarantees
Learning to optimize with convergence guarantees
Recent updates
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06/2025: Can we evolve the performance of accelerated optimization algorithms using neural-network update rules? Yes – with trade-offs on the worst-case exponential convergence rate. Preprint in collaboration with Andrea Martin and Ian R. Manchester available here (preliminary version for ECC 2025 in Thessaloniki).
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06/2025: I have joined the University of Oxford as an Associate Professor!
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06/2025: I will be speaking at the “Systems Theory of Optimization, Learning, and Control Algorithms” workshop at ECC 2025 on June 24, 2025. Workshop details
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04/2025: New preprint MAD: A Magnitude And Direction Policy Parametrization for Stability Constrained Reinforcement Learning on arXiv
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02/2025: Had a great time visiting Prof. Yang Zheng and his group at UC San Diego. I shared recent work on learning-based control and optimization. LinkedIn post.
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09/2024: Our paper On the guarantees of minimizing regret in receding horizon has been published in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
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08/2024: Our paper Learning to boost the performance of stable nonlinear systems has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems.
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06/2024: Attended the European Control Conference (ECC) in Stockholm!
Organized The Workshop Neural Networks in Control.
Paper Regret optimal control for uncertain stochastic systems (also published in the European Journal of Control).
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06/2024: I gave a talk in the Kolloquium Technische Kybernetik of the University of Stuttgart on Learning to optimize with convergence guarantees (slides available here) and visited the Institute of Systems Theory and Automatic Control hosted by Prof. Andrea Iannelli.
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05/2024: Our paper Learning to optimize with convergence guarantees using nonlinear system theory has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS).