Management Board Archives - Page 2 of 2 - ACE - Automatic Control Engineering Network

Kostas Margellos

Co-Chair of the AI and Data Grand Challenge Research Committee

Kostas Margellos (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering from the University of Patras, Patras, Greece, in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree in control engineering from ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, in 2012. He spent 2013, 2014, and 2015 as a Postdoctoral Researcher with ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, and Politecnico di Milano, respectively. In 2016, he joined the Control Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He is also a Fellow in AI and Machine Learning at Reuben College and a Lecturer at Worcester College.

He is currently an Associate Editor in Automatica and in the IEEE Control Systems Letters, and is part of the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society and EUCA. In 2024 he was general co-chair of the Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC 2024).

His research interests include data-driven and distributed optimization and control of complex uncertain systems, with applications to energy and transportation problems in smart cities.

Antonis Papachristodoulou

Co-Investigator and Co-Lead of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group

Antonis Papachristodoulou is the Statutory Professor of Control Engineering at the University of Oxford. He was previously EPSRC Fellow and Director of the EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral training in Synthetic Biology. He obtained the MA/MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K. in 2000, and the PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology, with a PhD Minor in Aeronautics in 2005.

His research is at the interface of control theory, optimisation and synthetic/engineering biology. In 2015 he was awarded the European Control Award for his contributions to robustness analysis and applications to networked control systems and systems biology and the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award. He is an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to the analysis and design of networked control systems. He was previously associate editor for Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Daniel Coca

Principal Investigator

Daniel is Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems with over 25 years’ experience in the field of engineering and higher education. Before joining Newcastle as Head of School of Engineering, he was Head of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, a post he held for eight years.

Daniel has extensive expertise in system identification and control of complex systems as well as signal processing, data analytics and machine learning using reconfigurable and GPU computing platforms. He has developed theory, methodology and algorithms to analyse, model and control fluid flows, reaction-diffusion systems, crystal growth processes and stem cell differentiation and pioneered the application of high-performance FPGA-based reconfigurable computers for real-time peptide mass fingerprinting, protein identification and quantitation. Funded by BBSRC and NSF in the US, he jointly led the development of the “Fruit Fly Brain Observatory”, a GPU-enabled platform for data analysis, modelling, simulation and visualisation of the fruit fly brain, which won the first phase of the Open Science Prize in 2016 and was included in the BBSRC Impact Showcase 2020.

He is member of the executive board of the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI) and Co-Director of the Urban Flows Observatory, which he helped establish as part of a £10 million investment from the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC).

Daniel has won research grants with a value of over £50 million from EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, US National Science Foundation and the Human Frontiers Science Program.

Fulvio Forni

Lead of the Early Career Researcher Group

Fulvio Forni is a Professor of Control Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he has been a faculty member since October 2015. He earned his PhD from the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ in 2010. Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Liège in Belgium and held visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh in the UK and the University of California Santa Barbara in the US.

Forni’s research interests encompass feedback control and robotics. He received the prestigious IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award in 2020.

He is a Director of Studies of Newnham College at Cambridge and serves as a co-investigator for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Agrifood Robotics ‘Agriforwards’.

Mike Chappell

Chair of the Ageing Society Grand Challenge Research Committee

Mike Chappell is a Professor within the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick where he heads the Systems and Information Engineering Discipline Stream that includes much of the Biomedical Engineering activity within the School. He is also a former Co-Lead for the University’s Global Research Priority programme for Health, heads the University’s Gait (motion capture) Laboratory and co-leads the School’s Biomedical Engineering Institute (the BMEI). He has research expertise in the systems modelling and data analysis of biomedical, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic, biological and Quantitative and Systems Pharmacology (QSP) processes.

Much of his work relates to the application to these fields of techniques in system dynamics, non-linear systems, data analytics, control and system identification with particular application to effective drug design and development, metabolic systems, cancer, diabetes, motion capture, orthotics and prosthetics. He also has specific expertise in structural identifiability and indistinguishability analyses that are important prerequisites to experiment design, model parameter estimation and model validation.

He has had close research collaborations with industry and hospital-based research groups for over 30 years, in particular, with The Binding Site/Thermo Fisher, where the modelling performed has driven and led to international clinical trials (e.g., EULite), AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. He led the Marie Curie funded European Industrial Doctorate training network on Innovative Modelling for Pharmaceutical Advances through Collaborative Training (IMPACT) in collaboration with AstraZeneca and has run three EPSRC funded Summer Schools on Mathematics for Biomedical Engineering at Warwick.

He is a member of the Management Committee for the initially EPSRC/MRC funded QSP-UK network that includes all of the major UK-based pharmaceutical companies and is the Principal Investigator on the current EPSRC funded PROLIMB project in collaboration with colleagues at UHCW and UCL. He is also currently a lead partner in the EU Horizon funded project ERAMET (Ecosystem for rapid adoption of modelling and simulation METhods) and a member of the International Federation for Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee 8.2 on Biological and Medical Systems.

Francesca Boem

Lead of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group

Francesca Boem received the MSc degree (cum laude) in Management Engineering in 2009 and the PhD degree in Information Engineering in 2013, both from the University of Trieste, Italy. She was Post-Doc at the University of Trieste with the Machine Learning Group from 2013 to 2014. From 2014 to 2018, she was Research Associate with the Control and Power research group at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, UK.

From 2015 to 2018 she was part of the team at Imperial College working on the flagship EU H2020-WIDESPREAD-TEAMING project for the development of the EU KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence in Cyprus. Dr Boem was awarded the Imperial College Research Fellowship in 2018, and in the same year she has been appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London, UK. She also is Honorary Lecturer at Imperial College London. In 2022 she has been awarded as PI the EPSRC New Investigator Award and a NNTI Joint Lab – Base Exploratory project in 2023. She is the Director of UCL’s MSc in Integrated Machine Learning Systems.

Her current research interests include distributed fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control methods for large-scale networked systems, safety and security of cyber-physical systems, learn-based control. Dr Boem is member of the IFAC Technical Committees 1.5 (Networked Systems) and 6.4 (“Fault Detection, Supervision & Safety of Technical Processes – SAFEPROCESS”) and Associate Editor for the IEEE Systems Journal, the EUCA European Journal of Control, and for the IEEE Control System Society, IFAC and EUCA Conference Editorial Boards.

Allahyar Montazeri

Co-Chair of the Future Mobility Grand Challenge Research Committee

Allahyar Montazeri is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering at Lancaster University. Before this, he was appointed as Assistant Professor in Control and Electronics Engineering with the Engineering Department at Lancaster University. Between 2010 and 2011, he joined the Fraunhofer Institute, Germany as a research fellow, and then carried on his research with Fraunhofer IDMT and Control Engineering Group at Ilmenau University, Germany during the years 2011 to 2013.

He has been a visiting research scholar with the Control Engineering Group at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and the Chemical Engineering Group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. Dr Montazeri is the recipient of the European Research Consortium on Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) and Humboldt Research awards in 2010 and 2011, respectively. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and serves on IFAC Technical Committees ’Adaptive and Learning Systems’ and ’Modelling, Identification, and Signal Processing’.

He is currently the Associate Editor of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Science Progress, and an editorial board member of Automation MDPI and Computational Intelligence in Electrical Engineering. He has been an international program committee member of several IEEE affiliated conferences and has organized various invited sessions and special issues for journals such as Electronics MDPI and IFAC MIM 2019 and 2022 conferences. His research is funded by different councils and industries in the UK such as the Engineering and Physical Research Council (EPSRC), Sellafield Ltd, National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), and Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

His research interests cover a wide range of areas on control theory and digital signal processing. Particularly he is interested in Adaptive Signal Processing and Control, Nonlinear Robust Control, Linear and Nonlinear System Identification, Estimation Theory, and Machine Learning techniques for optimization with applications in Robotics and Autonomous Systems as well as Active Noise and Vibration Control Systems.

Eric C Kerrigan

Chair of the Future Mobility Grand Challenge Research Committee

Eric Kerrigan is Professor of Control and Optimization at Imperial College London, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Department of Aeronautics. He completed his BSc(Eng) at the University of Cape Town and earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

His research focuses on developing theory and methods for model predictive control (MPC) to systematically address nonlinearities and uncertainties. His expertise lies in designing efficient numerical methods for real-time MPC, motivated by applications in aerospace, renewable energy, and information systems. He recently served as a Senior Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Want to know more? Read his recent interview with ACE