Necmiye Ozay

Maybe it is time to revise the three little pigs story…

4) Finally, I had distal radioulnar joint instability (hence the extended casting) and learned that hand surgeons and control theorists share one principle: we respect the unstable.

3) Full body manipulation & contact planning: we use our hands and contact forces to navigate the world all the time. Imagine getting in and out of an economy seat on a plane; or jumping over to sit on a table. When your wrist is not as mobile or weak to bear weight, these tasks become quite hard.

2) Jaw joints (think about Boston dynamic spot or any two finger manipulator) are indeed very useful, for instance for providing support for opening packages.

1) Bimanual manipulation is very powerful. While I initially thought not using my left arm/hand won’t be a big deal, I quickly realized for many tasks, we use both hands. Trying to do them with one is hard and even impossible at times.

How breaking my wrist and being in a long arm cast for an extended period of time made me appreciate certain robotics problems?

If I recall it right, they used to support a on-demand print option for each book. Not sure if this is something the author can choose. With a few clicks, I found this: services.publishing.umich.edu/Books/Electr... though it seems some recent ones are offered as ebooks only.

This is mainly for ECE textbooks but we have the following: fet.engin.umich.edu

“Optimizing Data for Decision-Making” by Asu Ozdaglar (MIT)

“Foundation Models for Autonomous Vehicles” by Marco Pavone (Stanford and NVIDIA)

Second (and last) day of L4DC also featured three great keynotes:

“You Trained with Offline RL---But How to Tune It?” by Nan Jiang (University of Illinois)

“Some variants of gradient dominance conditions motivated by LQR direct policy optimization” by Eduardo Sontag (Northeastern University)

“Federated Reinforcement Learning: Statistical and Communication Trade-offs” by Yuejie Chi (Carnegie Mellon University)

We had three wonderful keynotes today at L4DC’25:

"If Gen AI is the answer, what is the question? Some thoughts on the theory of generation" by Ambuj Tewari (University of Michigan)

Official start of L4DC’25

Time for exciting afternoon tutorials

"Capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Control Engineering" by Bin Hu, Geir Dullerud, Peter Seiler, and Huan Zhang

"The Scenario Approach: Data Science for Decision and Control" by Marco Claudio Campi and Simone Garatti

L4DC kicked off with the morning tutorials

"Higher-Order Learning Dynamics in Games" by Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Lacra Pavel, Jeff S. Shamma

"Neural Networks in the Loop: a Tutorial on Robust Machine Learning for Control" by Ian Manchester, Peter Seiler, Bin Hu

let's keep having fun (although the ride is a bit bumpy these days)

i am happy to announce that, effective august 25, the number of women full professors in my department will increase by 50%. i am afraid some of the external letter writers will still be calling me a "rising star" in my retirement memoir. jokes aside, thanks everyone for the support.

L4DC’25 early bird registration deadline is on May 2!

L4DC 2025 The explosion of real-time data arising from devices that sense and control the physical world requires improving synergy in research areas such as machine learning, control theory, and optimization. ...

L4DC’25 (7th Annual Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference) program is shaping up nicely. Check out the program, including exciting papers, keynotes, and tutorials: sites.google.com/umich.edu/l4...
Registration is now open! Come join us in Ann Arbor on June 4-6!

BREAKING: People are being suspended on X in Turkey for posting videos of these protests against Erdoğan’s corrupt and repressive regime.

Keep sharing everywhere.

I am definitely going to the grocery store more often and walking home from there 🙃

No surprise these programs graduated several future Turing Award winners. Congrats to Andrew Barto, the newest among this group.

They had classes in automata theory, AI, info theory, algorithms, optimization, control theory, and even social decision making. It had a perfect Cyber-Physical Systems curriculum before CPS was a thing (well cybernetics was a thing): drive.google.com/file/d/12SEj...

A little bit of interesting history: in late 60s, early 70s, two PhD programs were established at the University of Michigan: computing and communication sciences (CCS) in LSA and computer, information, and control engineering (CICE) in CoE.

I was taking uber from campus to home the other day and it was overly expensive. If instead I put the grocery store almost across my place as the destination, the price dropped to a half. Was it a discount for the grocery store or overcharging me since it learned my commute patterns?

NextProf Nexus - NextProf September 8-11, 2025 | Berkeley, CA Pursue a faculty position and build your network NextProf Nexus – sponsored by program partners, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, and Georgia Tech – is part...

A great workshop for senior PhD
students and postdocs interested in pursuing academic positions: nextprof.engin.umich.edu/nextprof-nex...

It is also somewhat challenging, since, as opposed to simple closed form solutions as in OLS where tools from statistical learning theory have been used recently, these control design algorithms are in the form of semi-definite programs. It is fun to think about sequences of random SDPs :-)

Noise Sensitivity of the Semidefinite Programs for Direct Data-Driven LQR In this paper, we study the noise sensitivity of the semidefinite program (SDP) proposed for direct data-driven infinite-horizon linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem for discrete-time linear time-...

Motivated by this, my student Xiong Zeng @zengxiong.bsky.social
has started looking into statistical analysis of some DDD control approaches for LQR. See arxiv.org/abs/2412.19705 I think statistical analysis of these new control approaches is an interesting research direction.

2) Approaches that indeed lead to new controllers that cannot be computed with previously known approaches. Here a thorough understanding of the properties of these new controllers and “input/output” behavior of the corresponding control design algorithms is important.

Hence their contribution should be evaluated in terms of improvements in computational complexity (e.g., lead to faster, memory efficient algorithms?), numerical stability (e.g., avoid ill-conditioned matrix operations?), or amenability to extensions (e.g., enable non-trivial extensions?)