Abolfazl Lavaei, Prof. Dr.-Ing. 
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Abolfazl Lavaei |
Biography
Abolfazl Lavaei is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Newcastle University in the UK. From January 2021 to July 2022, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich, working with Prof. Emilio Frazzoli on “Trustworthy Safety-Critical AI for Autonomous Vehicles”. He has also served as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) from November 2019 to January 2021. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) under the supervision of Prof. Majid Zamani. He obtained the M.Sc. degree in Aerospace Engineering with a specialization in Flight Dynamics and Control from the University of Tehran. He is the recipient of several international awards recognizing his work, including “Best Demo/Poster Award” at the ACM HSCC 2022, “Best Repeatability Prize” at the IFAC ADHS 2021, “Best Demo/Poster Award” at the ACM HSCC 2020, “IFAC Young Author Award Finalist” at the IFAC LSS 2019, “Best Graduate Student Award” at the University of Tehran with the full GPA (20/20), and several prestigious Ph.D. scholarships from top-ranked universities. He is an alumni scholar of Munich Aerospace Research Group as well as German Aerospace Center (DLR). He is also an IEEE Senior Member.
His line of research primarily focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of “formal verification, learning and control of large-scale stochastic cyber-physical systems” with application to autonomous systems. His research interests revolve around the intersection of Formal Methods in Computer Science, Control Theory, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
News
April 2024: New paper with David Angeli from Imperial College London: “From Dissipativity Property to Data-Driven GAS Certificate of Homogeneous Networks with Unknown Interconnection Topology”
March 2024: The paper “Scalable Synthesis of Safety Barrier Certificates for Networks of Stochastic Switched Systems” has been accepted as a full paper at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
March 2024: The program of our ECC workshop is now available online. Please see here for more details.
March 2024: The paper “Multiplicative Barrier Certificates for Probabilistic Safety of Markov Jump Systems” has been accepted at the 8th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS 2024).
March 2024: We will organize a workshop on “Data-Driven Verification and Control with Provable Guarantees” at the 22nd European Control Conference (ECC 2024). Co-organizers: Alessandro Abate (University of Oxford), Antonella Ferrara (University of Pavia), Antoine Girard (CNRS), Colin Jones (EPFL)
March 2024: Two papers have been accepted at the 22nd European Control Conference (ECC 2024): “Compositional Synthesis of Safety Barrier Certificates for Infinite Networks” and “Compositional Safety Verification of Infinite Networks: A Data-Driven Approach”
February 2024: I have been recognized as a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in recognition of Teaching Excellence.
February 2024: We will organize multiple invited sessions on “Data-Driven Control of CPS with Provable Guarantees: Theory and Application” at the 63rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2024). Co-organizers: Alessandro Abate (University of Oxford), Raphael Jungers (UCLouvain)
January 2024: The sole-authored paper “Abstraction-based Synthesis of Stochastic Hybrid Systems” has been accepted at the 27th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC 2024).
January 2024: I will serve as a member of the Artifact Evaluation Program Committee for the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2024).
January 2024: A new tool paper, offering the first push-button software for parallel IMDP synthesis with convergence guarantees: “IMPaCT: Interval MDP Parallel Construction for Controller Synthesis of Large-Scale Stochastic Systems”
January 2024: I have been selected for the Digital Futures Early Career Programme 2024. I will be embarking on a three-month sabbatical during Summer 2024 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, hosted by Prof. Henrik Sandberg.
January 2024: There is a PhD opening for my EPSRC DTP Project on “Towards Safe and Efficient AI-enabled Control of Autonomous Vehicles via Quantum Computing” with a deadline of February 15. Please see here for more details.
January 2024: Jamie Gardner will be joining my group as a PhD student (starting from April 2024).
January 2024: I will give a talk in the Oxford Control Seminar at the University of Oxford in February 2024 on “how to bridge the gap between formal methods and data science for developing highly-reliable cyber-physical systems, while effectively overcoming the challenges posed by high dimensionality”.
December 2023: My EPSRC DTP proposal on “Towards Safe and Efficient AI-enabled Control of Autonomous Vehicles via Quantum Computing” got accepted. The advert of PhD opening for this proposal will be announced in January 2024.
December 2023: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for the 8th IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA 2024), to be held in Newcastle, UK.
December 2023: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for the 27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2024).
December 2023: I have been appointed as a Publication Editor for the 8th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS 2024).
November 2023: Two new papers on compositional design of large-scale networks with an infinite number of agents: “Compositional Synthesis of Safety Barrier Certificates for Infinite Networks” and “Compositional Safety Verification of Infinite Networks: A Data-Driven Approach”
October 2023: The paper “Data-Driven Controller Synthesis via Finite Abstractions with Formal Guarantees” has been accepted at IEEE Control Systems Letters.
October 2023: The paper “Compositional Reinforcement Learning for Discrete-Time Stochastic Control Systems” has been accepted at IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems (Special Section on Formal Verification and Synthesis of Cyber-Physical Systems).
October 2023: I will serve as a member of the International Program Committee for the 8th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS 2024).
September 2023: We will organize multiple invited sessions on “Data-Driven Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems” at the 22nd European Control Conference (ECC 2024). Co-organizers: Alessandro Abate (University of Oxford), Dimos Dimarogonas (KTH), Antoine Girard (CNRS), Raphael Jungers (UCLouvain), Manuel Mazo (TU Delft)
September 2023: I will serve as a member of the Program Committee for the 6th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC 2024), to be held in University of Oxford.
September 2023: New book on stochastic CPS: “Formal Methods for Stochastic Cyber-Physical Systems”. This book is co-authored with Alessandro Abate from University of Oxford and is contracted to be published by Cambridge University Press within the next year.
August 2023: I will serve as a member of the Program Committee for the 27th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC 2024), as a part of CPS-IoT Week 2024.
August 2023: I will serve as a member of the Program Committee for the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), Special Track on Safe, Robust and Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
July 2023: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for European Control Conference (ECC 2024).
July 2023: I will chair multiple invited sessions on “Data-Driven Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems” at the 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023).
July 2023: New paper on robust simulation functions: “Formal Control of New England 39-Bus Test System: An Assume-Guarantee Approach”
July 2023: Three papers have been accepted at the 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023): “Symbolic Abstractions with Guarantees: A Data-Driven Divide-and-Conquer Strategy”, “MDP Abstractions from Data: Large-Scale Stochastic Networks”, and “Data-Driven Stability Certificate of Interconnected Homogeneous Networks via ISS Properties”.
July 2023: Three invited sessions on “Data-Driven Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems” have been accepted at the 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023).
July 2023: I will give a talk at Shanghai University on “how to combine formal methods and data science for designing highly-reliable cyber-physical systems while breaking the curse of dimensionality”.
July 2023: The program of our IFAC workshop is now available online. Please see here for more details.
June 2023: The paper “Data-Driven Verification and Synthesis of Stochastic Systems via Barrier Certificates” has been provisionally accepted as a regular paper at Automatica.
June 2023: I have been appointed as the Publication Chair for the 27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2024).
June 2023: The paper “Data-Driven Stability Certificate of Interconnected Homogeneous Networks via ISS Properties” has been accepted at IEEE Control Systems Letters.
June 2023: The paper “Compositional Synthesis of Control Barrier Certificates for Networks of Stochastic Systems against ω-Regular Specifications” has been accepted at Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems.
May 2023: New paper on stochastic systems with wireless communications: “Safety Barrier Certificates for Stochastic Control Systems with Wireless Communication Networks”
May 2023: Our Automatica paper “Automata-based Controller Synthesis for Stochastic Systems: A Game Framework via Approximate Probabilistic Relations” has been selected as the Editor's Choice paper for January 2023 (nominated by Editor-in-Chief, Andrew Teel).
May 2023: Ben Wooding will be joining my group as a Postdoctoral Researcher (starting from November 2023).
April 2023: I will give a workshop talk on “Data-Driven Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems” at the IFAC World Congress 2023.
April 2023: I have been appointed as the Website Co-chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Hybrid Systems.
April 2023: New paper with David Angeli from Imperial College London: “Data-Driven Stability Certificate of Interconnected Homogeneous Networks via ISS Properties”
April 2023: Behrad Samari will be joining my group as a PhD student (starting from September 2023).
April 2023: New papers on symbolic/MDP abstractions from data for large-scale networks: “Symbolic Abstractions with Guarantees: A Data-Driven Divide-and-Conquer Strategy” and “MDP Abstractions from Data: Large-Scale Stochastic Networks”
April 2023: New paper on finite abstractions from data with confidence 1: “Data-Driven Controller Synthesis via Finite Abstractions with Formal Guarantees”
March 2023: We are organizing the ARCH initiative: An annual friendly competition among software tools for stochastic hybrid systems. The scientific report will be published during CPS-IoT Week 2023.
March 2023: The paper “Robust Simulation Functions with Disturbance Refinement” has been accepted at the 21st European Control Conference (ECC 2023).
March 2023: The paper “A Compositional Dissipativity Approach for Data-Driven Safety Verification of Large-Scale Dynamical Systems” has been accepted as a full paper at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
February 2023: I have been appointed as the Publicity Chair for the 8th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS 2024).
February 2023: There is a postdoc position with a deadline of March 10. Please see here for more details.
February 2023: The paper “Formal Verification of Unknown Discrete- and Continuous-Time Systems: A Data-Driven Approach” has been accepted as a full paper at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (Special Issue on Learning for Control).
February 2023: Together with Raphael Jungers and Alessandro Abate, we will organize multiple invited sessions on “Data-Driven Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems” at the 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023).
January 2023: There is a PhD opening for our EPSRC DTP Project on “Safe AI-enabled Control of Autonomous Vehicles” with a deadline of February 24. Please see here for more details.
December 2022: Our EPSRC DTP proposal on “Safe AI-enabled Control of Autonomous Vehicles” got accepted. The advert of PhD openings for this proposal will be announced in January 2023.
December 2022: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for IFAC journal Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems (NAHS) starting in February 2023.
December 2022: We will organize a workshop on “Data-Driven Verification and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems” at the IFAC World Congress 2023.
October 2022: New paper on robust simulation functions: “Robust Simulation Functions with Disturbance Refinement”
September 2022: I have been elevated to “IEEE Senior Member” Grade.
September 2022: I will chair the session “Stochastic Systems” at the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2022).
September 2022: I will teach the course “Systems Design and Architectures” during Autumn 2022 at School of Computing.
August 2022: I will give a talk in the Department of Computer Science at University of Oxford on “How to Construct Symbolic/MDP Abstractions for CPS using Data while Providing Out-of-Sample Performance Guarantees”.
August 2022: I will give a talk in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on “Safe Learning and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems”.
August 2022: I have been appointed as IEEE CSS Technology Conferences Editorial Board (TCEB).
August 2022: I have a PhD opening in my group on “Towards Trustworthy AI for Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems”. Please see here for more details.
August 2022: Mahdieh Zaker will be joining my group as a PhD student (starting from January 2023).
August 2022: Omid Akbarzadeh will be joining my group as a PhD student (starting from October 2022).
July 2022: I will give a talk in the School of Mathematics at The University of Edinburgh on “How to Provide Safety Certificates for Autonomous Vehicles using Data Science and Optimization in Operations Research”.
July 2022: I will co-chair the session “Large-Scale Systems” at the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2022).
July 2022: I will teach the course “Computer Networks” during Autumn 2022 and the courses “Fundamentals of Computing” and “Research Methods and Group Project in Security and Resilience” during Spring 2023 at School of Computing.
July 2022: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for European Control Conference (ECC 2023).
July 2022: Five papers/presentations (joint with L-CSS) have been accepted at the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2022).
July 2022: Two papers “Data-Driven Stability Verification of Homogeneous Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Dynamics” and “Scalable Synthesis of Finite MDPs for Large-Scale Stochastic Switching Systems” have been accepted at the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2022).
July 2022: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for a Special Section entitled “Formal Verification and Synthesis of Cyber-Physical Systems” in IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems.
July 2022: I have a PhD opening in my group with a deadline of July 13th. Please see here for more details.
June 2022: I will be joining School of Computing at Newcastle University in UK as an Assistant Professor from July 1st.
June 2022: The paper “Constructing MDP Abstractions Using Data with Formal Guarantees” has been accepted at IEEE Control Systems Letters.
June 2022: The paper “Automated Verification and Synthesis of Stochastic Hybrid Systems: A Survey” has been accepted as a survey paper at Automatica.
June 2022: The paper “Data-Driven Synthesis of Symbolic Abstractions with Guaranteed Confidence” has been accepted at IEEE Control Systems Letters.
June 2022: The paper “Estimation of Infinitesimal Generators for Unknown Stochastic Hybrid Systems via Sampling: A Formal Approach” has been accepted at IEEE Control Systems Letters.
June 2022: The paper “Automata-based Controller Synthesis for Stochastic Systems: A Game Framework via Approximate Probabilistic Relations” has been provisionally accepted as a regular paper at Automatica.
May 2022: The paper “From Small-Gain Theory to Compositional Construction of Barrier Certificates for Large-Scale Stochastic Systems” has been accepted at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
May 2022: I will chair the session “Stochastic Systems” in virtual American Control Conference (ACC 2022).
May 2022: I will co-chair the session “Hybrid Systems” in virtual American Control Conference (ACC 2022).
May 2022: The paper “Data-Driven Estimation of Collision Risks for Autonomous Vehicles with Formal Guarantees” has received “Best Demo/Poster Award” at the 25th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC 2022).
April 2022: The paper “Formal Estimation of Collision Risks for Autonomous Vehicles: A Compositional Data-Driven Approach” has been conditionally accepted at IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
March 2022: I will serve as a member of the International Program Committee for the 4th IFAC Workshop on Cyber-Physical & Human Systems (CPHS 2022).
March 2022: The paper “From Dissipativity Theory to Compositional Synthesis of Large-Scale Stochastic Switched Systems” has been accepted as a full paper at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
February 2022: I will serve as a member of the Technical Program Committee for Workshop on Computation-Aware Algorithmic Design for Cyber-Physical Systems (CAADCPS) at the CPS-IoT Week 2022.
February 2022: The paper “Compositional Construction of Safety Controllers for Networks of Continuous-Space POMDPs” has been accepted at IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
January 2022: Two papers “Compositional Controller Synthesis for Interconnected Stochastic Systems with Markovian Switching” and “Safety Barrier Certificates for Stochastic Hybrid Systems” have been accepted at American Control Conference (ACC 2022).
November 2021: I will serve as a member of the Technical Program Committee for Posters and Demo Sessions of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS 2022).
October 2021: The paper “Safe-visor Architecture for Sandboxing (AI-based) Unverified Controllers in Stochastic Cyber-Physical Systems” has been accepted at Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems (Special Issue on Security, Privacy and Safety of Cyber-Physical Systems).
July 2021: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor for European Control Conference (ECC 2022).
July 2021: The paper “Data-Driven Safety Verification of Stochastic Systems via Barrier Certificates” has received “Best Repeatability Prize” at the 7th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS 2021).
February 2021: I will serve as a member of the Technical Program Committee for Workshop on Computation-Aware Algorithmic Design for Cyber-Physical Systems (CAADCPS) at the CPS-IoT Week 2021.
February 2021: Two papers “Data-Driven Safety Verification of Stochastic Systems via Barrier Certificates” and “Data-Driven Estimation of Infinitesimal Generators of Stochastic Systems” have been accepted at the 7th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS).
October 2020: I will be joining Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich as a Postdoctoral Associate working with Prof. Emilio Frazzoli from January 2021. My research topic would be “Trustworthy Safety-Critical AI for Autonomous Vehicles”.
June 2020: The paper “Compositional Abstraction-based Synthesis of General MDPs via Approximate Probabilistic Relations” has been accepted at Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems.
April 2020: The paper “AMYTISS: A Parallelized Tool on Automated Controller Synthesis for Large-Scale Stochastic Systems” has received “Best Demo/Poster Award” at the 23rd ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC 2020).
April 2020: The paper “AMYTISS: PArallelized AutoMated Controller SYnthesis for Large-Scale STochastIc SystemS” has been accepted at the 32nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
February 2020: The paper “Compositional Construction of Control Barrier Certificates for Large-Scale Interconnected Stochastic Systems” has been accepted at the 21st IFAC World Congress.
January 2020: The paper “Compositional (In)Finite Abstractions for Large-Scale Interconnected Stochastic Systems” has been accepted as a full paper at IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.
December 2019: The paper “Formal Controller Synthesis for Continuous-Space MDPs via Model-Free Reinforcement Learning” has been accepted at the 11th ACM/IEEE Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS).
November 2019: The paper “Compositional Abstraction-based Synthesis for Networks of Stochastic Switched Systems” has been accepted as a regular paper at Automatica.
October 2019: I have been selected as highly-qualified scientists for permanent residence of Germany (Niederlassungserlaubnis für Hochqualifizierte).
August 2019: I will be joining Department of Computer Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) as a Postdoctoral Researcher (Group Leader) from November 2019.
July 2019: The paper “Compositional Verification of Large-Scale Stochastic Systems via Relaxed Small-Gain Conditions” has been accepted at the 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).
July 2019: The paper “Compositional Abstraction of Large-Scale Stochastic Systems: A Relaxed Dissipativity Approach” has been accepted at Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems.
May 2019: The paper “Compositional Construction of Finite MDPs for Large-Scale Stochastic Switched Systems: A Dissipativity Approach” has been selected as “IFAC Young Author Award Finalist” at the 15th IFAC Symposium on Large-Scale Complex Systems: Theory and Applications (LSS).
May 2019: The paper “Compositional Construction of Infinite Abstractions for Networks of Stochastic Control Systems” has been accepted as a regular paper at Automatica.
May 2019: The paper “Approximate Probabilistic Relations for Compositional Synthesis of Stochastic Systems” has been accepted at the Numerical Software Verification (NSV), Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
March 2019: The paper “Compositional Construction of Finite MDPs for Large-Scale Stochastic Switched Systems: A Dissipativity Approach” has been accepted at the 15th IFAC Symposium on Large-Scale Complex Systems: Theory and Applications (LSS).
February 2019: The paper “Compositional Synthesis of not Necessarily Stabilizable Stochastic Systems via Finite Abstractions” has been accepted at the 18th European Control Conference (ECC).
January 2019: I will be visiting Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC) at Delft University of Technology for three months (May-August 2019). My research topic would be “Formal Verification and Synthesis of Black-Box Stochastic Hybrid Systems via Data-Driven Optimization”.
February 2018: The paper “Compositional Synthesis of Finite Abstractions for Continuous-Space Stochastic Control Systems: A Small-Gain Approach” has been accepted at the 6th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS).
December 2017: The paper “From Dissipativity Theory to Compositional Construction of Finite Markov Decision Processes” has been accepted at the 21st ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC).
July 2017: The paper “Compositional Abstractions of Interconnected Discrete-Time Stochastic Control Systems” has been accepted at the 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).