Yang Zheng
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Assistant Professor Office: #3308 Franklin Antonio Hall ORCID · Google Scholar
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Office hours
Tuesday, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Feel free to email me to schedule office hours if needed.
Prospective students: I am actively seeking highly motivated students with a strong background in mathematics, theory, and computation to join my research group. If you have a strong interest in optimization and control, I encourage you to apply. Application instructions can be found here.
Prospective students and visiting interns are welcome to get in touch. Feel free to drop me an email (zhengy@ucsd.edu) with your CV, transcripts, and a brief overview of your interest in joining my group.
Check here: Join us!
Brief Biography
I am an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego. I am affiliated with the CSE department and Contextual Robotics Institute.
From March 2019 to August 2020, I was a postdoctoral scholar in SEAS and CGBC at Harvard University, working with Prof. Na Li and Prof. Ali Malkawi. I was a research associate in the Verification of Autonomous Systems group at Imperial College London in 2021. I received the B.S. and M.E. degrees in the Department of Automotive Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2013 and 2015, respectively. In Feb. 2019, I received the DPhil (Ph.D.) degree in Control from the University of Oxford for my work on Chordal Sparsity in Control and Optimization of Large-scale Systems under the supervision of Prof. Antonis Papachristodoulou.
I am broadly interested in learning, optimization, and control of network systems, and their applications to autonomous vehicles and traffic systems. My current research interests include:
Convex and non-convex optimization for control.
Principled data-driven and learning-based control.
Structures and algorithms for scalable conic optimization.
Applications in mixed traffic control, and certifiable robustness of machine learning (e.g., deep neural networks).
Check out some exciting research in the SOC lab at UCSD.
Updates
11/2024: Our paper: Willems’ Fundamental Lemma for Nonlinear Systems with Koopman Linear Embedding was accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS). Congratulations to Xu Shang!
11/2024: A short summary on Extended Convex Lifting for Policy Optimization of Optimal and Robust Control. For long reports, see Part I and Part II.
11/2024: Our paper: Decentralized Robust Data-driven Predictive Control for Smoothing Mixed Traffic Flow was accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Congratulations to Xu Shang and Jiawei Wang!
10/2024: Our paper: Inexact Augmented Lagrangian Methods for Conic Programs: Quadratic Growth and Linear Convergence was accepted at NeurIPS 2024 as a poster. Congratulations to Feng-Yi Liao!
09/2024: We are excited to welcome Mr. Yuto Watanabe and Dr. Jiachen Qian to our SOC group! Welcome aboard, Yuto and Jiachen!
09/2024: Check out our new preprint Willems’ Fundamental Lemma for Nonlinear Systems with Koopman Linear Embedding
07/2024: Attended the L4DC conference at the University of Oxford, and presented poster 1 and poster 2.
06/2024: Check out our new preprint: Benign Nonconvex Landscapes in Optimal and Robust Control, Part II: Extended Convex Lifting.
03/2024: Our SOC Lab has two papers accepted for presentation at the 2024 L4DC!
03/2024: Presented an invited talk on Error bounds, PL, and Quadratic Growth for Weakly Convex Functions, and Linear Convergences of Proximal Point Methods at the 2024 INFORMS IOS conference.
02/2024: Presented a talk on Benign Nonconvex Landscapes in Optimal and Robust Control at the 2024 ITA workshop.
01/2024: Received the NSF CAREER Award! The project title is CAREER: Interplay between Convex and Nonconvex Optimization for Control.
01/2024: Received the 2024 UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering Early Career Faculty Development Award (together with Prof. Jorge Cortes).