The paper on MPCritic: A Plug-and-Play MPC Architecture for Reinforcement Learning was presented by Nathan at the 63rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
Congratulations Tommy!
Tommy received second place in the CAST Directors’ Student Presentation Awards, presenting his work “MPCritic: A Unified Framework for MPC and Reinforcement Learning” at the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting.
Call for Papers
Ali Mesbah and Nathan Lawrence will be organizing an open invite track at IFAC 2026 Busan: Learning Interpretable and Safe Control Policies: Interface Between Model-free Learning and Model-based Control. For more information see the proposal and conference website to submit a contribution.
Journal Publication
The paper Interpretable attention-based transfer learning in plasma catalysis: a study on the role of surface charge has been accepted for publication in EES Catalysis.
Call for Papers
An upcoming special issue in Control Engineering Practice aims to collect novel Bayesian optimization approaches for the optimization and tuning of industrial and personalized systems and processes. For more information, please see here.
Journal Publication
The paper Gradient-Based Framework for Bilevel Optimization of Black-Box Functions: Synergizing Model-Free Reinforcement Learning and Implicit Function Differentiation has been accepted for publication in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research special issue “AI/ML in Chemical Engineering”.
Journal Publication
The paper Coactive Preference-Guided Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization: An Application to Policy Learning in Personalized Plasma Medicine has been accepted for publication in IEEE Control Systems Letters.
Journal Publication
The paper Data-Driven Discovery of Sparse Dimensionless Numbers and Nondimensional Relations for Low-Temperature Plasmas has been accepted for publication in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
Conference Publication
The paper on Preference-based Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Gradients will be presented by Joshua at the 2024 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) tomorrow, December 14th. More information on the session is available here.
Journal Publication
The paper A Cold Atmospheric Plasma Sensor for Identification and Differentiation of Biological Tissues has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences.
Welcome Alan, Harry, Shauryaraj, and Nathan!
Alan Stoev, Harry Papargyriou, and Shauryaraj Jilkar have joined the lab as a Graduate Student Researchers, and Nathan P. Lawrence has joined the lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Welcome Alan, Harry, Shauryaraj, and Nathan!
Journal Publication
The paper Nitrogen accountancy in space agriculture has been accepted for publication in npj Microgravity.
Conference Publication
The paper Time-Varying Bayesian Optimization for MPC Calibration for Run-to-Run Drifting Systems: A Study on Discrete-Temporal Kernels has been accepted for publication in IFAC-PapersOnLine.
Conference Publication
The paper Stability-informed Bayesian Optimization for MPC Cost Function Learning has been accepted for publication in IFAC-PapersOnLine.
Conference Publication
The paper Efficient Performance-based MPC Tuning in High Dimensions using Bayesian Optimization over Sparse Subspaces has been presented at the 2024 12th IFAC International Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes.
Journal Publication
The paper on A practical multiobjective learning framework for optimal hardware-software co-design of control-on-a-chip systems has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
Journal Publication
The paper on Future of plasma etching for microelectronics: Challenges and opportunities has been accepted for publication in Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B.
Journal Publication
The paper Run-indexed time-varying Bayesian optimization with positional encoding for auto-tuning of controllers: Application to a plasma-assisted deposition process with run-to-run drifts has been accepted for publication in Computers & Chemical Engineering.
Congratulations Thomas!
Thomas was selected as a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.
Workshop
We are excited to announce Dr. Ali Mesbah will be speaking at the ECC 2024 Workshop: When Bayesian optimization meets real-time control on Tuesday, June 25th, 2024 at the European Control Conference 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden. Please join us to learn about Bayesian optimization and its applications in real-time control and optimization. Updates, registration, and itinerary can be found on the following website: https://sites.google.com/view/bo2control.