Systems and controls

Kerstin Dautenhahn is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She is a Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics and is cross-appointed to the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, and the Department of Systems Design Engineering at University of Waterloo. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. At Waterloo she is the Director of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL)).

The main areas of her research are Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Assistive Technology and Health Technologies. She is Editor in Chief (jointly with Prof. Angelo Cangelosi - University of Manchester, UK) of the Journal Interaction Studies- Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems published by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Editorial Board Member of Adaptive Behavior, Sage Publications, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, published by Springer, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. She is an Editor of the book series Advances in Interaction Studies, published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. Dr. Dautenhahn is on the Advisory Board of the journal AI and Society (Springer). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), Fellow of the IEEE, member of ACM, and a Lifelong Fellow of AISB, as well as a member of the Executive Board of the International Foundation for Responsible Robotics. Since 2006 she has been part of the Standing Steering Committee of the IEEE conference RO-MAN (Human and Robot Interactive Communication).

Graduate students or postdocs who wish to join her lab are asked to first consult this information: https://uwaterloo.ca/social-intelligent-robotics-research-lab/graduatepostdoc-applicants

Dr. Dautenhahn will not be able to respond to emails unless applicants have the required research background.

Dan Davison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

His research interests include theoretical control, which involves various aspects of linear and nonlinear control, including performance limitations in feedback control, multi-agent control schemes, and time-delay systems.

Dr. Davison is also interested in applied control, in areas such as psychological systems with rich dynamics. Current projects include stabilization of crowds governed by notions of suggestibility, the modeling of cognitive dissonance, and the study of social psychological systems in which a person is influencing others to change their attitude. His approach towards research is that he allows applications to motivate the discovery of theories instead of the other way around, which reduces the need to force the finding of applications for theories. He has written various papers about control theory and its applications.

Michael Fisher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research is centered around dynamics, optimization, and control of complex systems. He received his PhD in electrical engineering: systems at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2020, and a MSc. in mathematics from the same university in 2017. Prior to joining Waterloo he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Automatic Control Laboratory and the Power System Laboratory at ETH Zurich from 2020-2022. He was a finalist for the 2017 Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Best Student Paper Award, and a recipient of the 2019 CDC Outstanding Student Paper Award.

Chrystopher Nehaniv is a full professor in the departments of Systems Design Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo (since August 2018). He is a Mathematician, Computer Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems Researcher. He is also affiliated with the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, where he served as Director of the Centre for Computer Science & Informatics Research prior to coming to Canada, leading research in the Algorithms, Adaptive Systems, and Wolfson Royal Society Biocomputation Research Groups there as Professor of Mathematical and Evolutionary Computer Sciences. Previously, he held positions as full professor at the University of Aizu in Japan, and visiting professor in Mathematics at Ibaraki National University, Japan, and at the Institute for Mathematics & Informatics at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, as well as post-doctoral research fellow and lecturer in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is founder of the Waterloo Algebraic Intelligence & Computation Laboratory (WAICL), and with Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, a co-founder of the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL). Professor Nehaniv is also a member of the Waterloo AI Institute and the steering committee of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI). He serves as Associate Editor for the journals BioSystems, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, Interaction Studies, and Complexity, and previously as Topic Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems for the topics of AI Robotics and Human-Machine/Robot Interaction, and has served on the IEEE Task Force for Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems since its founding in 2003, as Chair (2012-2018), Vice Chair (2018-), and on the IEEE Cognitive and Developmental Systems Technical Committee (2019-) of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

Christopher Nielsen is a Professor and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

Professor Nielsen’s current research interests include nonlinear control systems, motion control for nonlinear systems, methods to stabilize sets in the state space of a system, output feedback control, geometric control and Computer Aided Design (CAD) for nonlinear controllers. His current research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Additionally, Professor Nielsen has authored or co-authored journal articles appearing in the IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control, Automatica, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimizations among others.

Gennaro Notomista is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada. Prior to joining University of Waterloo, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the CNRS/Inria/IRISA, Rennes, France. His main research interests lie at the intersection of design and control of robotic systems for long-duration autonomy with applications to environmental monitoring.

He received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, Napoli, Italy, in 2012, a M.Eng. degree in automotive engineering from the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany, in 2015, a M.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”, Napoli, Italy, in 2016, a M.S. degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. degree in robotics from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

Dr. Notomista is a Fulbright Scholar and was the recipient of the Alumni Small Grant (2020) and the IEEE ARSO Best Paper Award (2022). He is an IEEE member, associate editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and guest associate editor of Autonomous Robots.

Yash Vardhan Pant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on building robust and reliable autonomous systems, using elements of Control Theory, Formal Methods, Machine Learning and Optimization. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, where he was a recipient of the Richard K. Dentel memorial award for research in Urban transportation. Prior to joining Waterloo in July 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stephen L. Smith is a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, the Canada Research Chair in Autonomous Systems, and the Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory. He is a licensed Professional Engineer (PEng) by the Professional Engineers Ontario and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and the Co-chair the 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2021). Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Professor Smith's research group focuses on control, learning, and optimization for autonomous systems and robotics. Through this research he collaborates with several industrial partners in robotics and transportation systems and have designed control, optimization, and autonomy for improving efficiency in applications including future urban mobility systems, underwater ocean monitoring, and industrial robotic cleaning.

John Thistle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is currently a member of the Waterloo Formal Methods (WatForm) research group, which studies applications of formal methods in hardware design and software engineering.

Professor Thistle’s research interests include control of discrete event systems, formal synthesis and verification of discrete event systems, and applications to software development. He is also focusing on the decidability and complexity of the synthesis of centralized and distributed controllers. Potential applications occur not only in traditional control engineering areas but also, for example, in the design of distributed software systems.

David Wang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is cross-appointed to the Mechatronics and Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Waterloo. He was previously the President of Handshake Interactive Technologies Inc., a UWaterloo spin-off company founded by Professor Wang.
His research interests include robot manipulators, nonlinear control, flexible link manipulators, automated mechatronics design, haptics, telehaptics and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Andrew Heunis is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and cross-appointed to Statistics and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Waterloo.

Professor Heunis currently has research interests in stochastic algorithms, system identification, nonlinear filtering and stochastic differential equations. He has published journals with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and IEEE, as well as various PDF texts.

Daniel Miller is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.

His research interests lie in the areas of adaptive control, decentralized control, and control with delays. His research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. His work has appeared in such journals as the IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control and the Mathematics of Control, Signals and Systems. He recently co-authored a book on decentralized control.

John W. Simpson-Porco received the B.Sc. degree in engineering physics from Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA in 2015. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada. He was previously a visiting scientist with the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on the control and optimization of multi-agent systems and networks, with applications in modernized power grids. Prof. Simpson-Porco is a recipient of the 2012--2014 IFAC Automatica Prize and the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation Best Thesis Award and Outstanding Scholar Fellowship.