Autonomous systems in the intersection of formal methods, learning, and control

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• Ufuk Topcu, University of Texas at Austin
• Wednesday 31 January 2024, 14:30-15:30
• 909B Seminar Room .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Giordano Scarciotti.

Abstract: Autonomous systems are emerging as a driving technology for countlessly many applications. Numerous disciplines tackle the challenges toward making these systems trustworthy, adaptable, user-friendly, and economical. On the other hand, the existing disciplinary boundaries delay and possibly even obstruct progress. I argue that the nonconventional problems that arise in designing and verifying autonomous systems require hybrid solutions at the intersection of learning, formal methods, and controls. I will present examples of such hybrid solutions in the context of learning in sequential decision-making processes. These results offer novel means for effectively integrating physics-based, contextual, or structural prior knowledge into data-driven learning algorithms. They improve data efficiency by several orders of magnitude and generalizability to environments and tasks that the system had not experienced previously. I will conclude with remarks on a few promising future research directions.

Biography: Ufuk Topcu is a Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Temple Foundation Endowed Professorship No. 1 Professorship. He is a core faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and Texas Robotics and the director of the Autonomous Systems Group. Ufuk’s research focuses on the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of the design and verification of autonomous systems, typically in the intersection of formal methods, reinforcement learning, and control theory.

This talk is part of the Control and Power Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• 909B Seminar Room
• Andrea Picciau's list
• Control and Power Seminars

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