Mahyar Fazlyab is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of July 2021, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. He is also a core faculty member of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS). His research focuses on the analysis and design of robust and safe learning-enabled autonomous systems, drawing on tools from non-convex optimization and control theory. Mahyar received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, where he was also awarded the Rosaline Wolf Best Doctoral Dissertation Award.
His favorite dissertation paper is “Analysis of optimization algorithms via integral quadratic constraints: Nonstrongly convex problems.
Konstantinos Gatsis is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Villanova University, USA. Previously, he was a Lecturer in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, UK. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 2016, and the diploma degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Patras, Patras, Greece in 2010. His research interests include cyber-physical systems and autonomy, developing algorithms at the intersection of control, learning, security, and optimization. Dr. Gatsis received the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the 2023 IEEE Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2014 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, the Student Best Paper Award at the 2013 American Control Conference, and has been nominated for other best paper awards.
His favorite dissertation paper is “Opportunistic Control Over Shared Wireless Channels.”
Michael Zargham is the founder and Chief Engineer at BlockScience, a systems engineering firm focused on digital public infrastructure. He is also Board Member and Research Director at US Based Non-Profit Metagov – a community of practice focused on digitally mediated self-governance. He is also an advisory council member at NumFocus – A US Based Non-Profit which promotes open practices in research, data, and scientific computing by serving as a fiscal sponsor for open source projects. Zargham’s research focus is on formal methods in mechanism, market and institution design applying methods from Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) with influences from Institutional Economics and Organizational Cybernetics.
His favorite dissertation paper is “Discounted integral priority routing for data networks” and his most recent work is an invited book chapter on “Protocols and Institutions.”