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We are proud to announce three entirely new research projects for NCCR Automation, all centred around the topic of robotics.

Do you need a break from research? Would you like to learn something new, gain a different perspective? Then you might want to consider doing an industry internships for a few months. Three of our NCCR Automation researchers have done this, and they all strongly recommend it.

Congratulations to Panagiotis D. Grontas who won for the paper “BIG Hype: Best Intervention in Games via Distributed Hypergradient Descent”.

Congratulations to Jonas Matt who won the community award and Jared Miller who won the jury award.

Zappy, robotics workshops for girls and boys, targets 11 to 13 years old in order to introduce them to the robotics world. The courses are free and open to all. The organization of separate workshops for girls and boys with the same content also aims to encourage girls' access to these activities.

Mengmeng Li was awarded the second place in the 2025 Dupačová-Prékopa Best Student Paper Prize for her paper "Towards Optimal Offline Reinforcement Learning" (co-authored with Daniel Kuhn and Tobias Sutter).

This time host Alberto Padoan takes us on a deep dive into some of the main pillars of modern control theory. From Kalman's paradigm-shifting state-space approach to the space race, complex networks, and more...

This year’s John von Neumann Lecture explored “Privacy for the Paranoid Ones”, but paranoia isn’t really the point. The point is to win an ancient game.

Congratulations to Jan Brändle, who won the medal for his thesis which focused on quantification of the flexibility potential of real-world distribution grids.

Florian Dörfler has been awarded this year’s Rössler Prize in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the fields of energy and control engineering. The award, worth CHF 200,000, is the most generous research prize at ETH Zurich and was presented to him at the ETH Foundation’s annual thanksgiving event.

Maitraya Desai is a doctoral student in the Power Systems Laboratory, researching at the intersection of power systems, power electronics and control. In this interview, he explains a novel control approach for grid-forming converters that could enhance the stability of future power grids, especially with high penetration of renewable energy sources.

Congratulations to the NCCR Automation team.

This body will advise the Executive Board on fundamental issues such as the direction of ETH's strategy, the role of universities in sustainable development and international developments related to sustainability.

The KlimUp prize supports start-ups in with a focus on climate protection.

When it comes to optimising energy efficiency on the railways, speed is of the essence – but not for the drivers! It’s in the computations that faster really is better.

Join us for the 2025 John von Neumann lecture as Artur Ekert (University of Oxford, Centre for Quantum Technologies) guides us through "Privacy for the paranoid ones - the ultimate limits of secrecy"

Our latest fact sheet, co-authored with SATW, shows application cases for AI.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apply now for the opportunity to spend up to six months in an NCCR Automation lab.

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