SOC Lab – Seminars

Within the SOC Lab, we host two regular events: SOC Reading Group and SOC Group Meeting.

Reading Group

We meet regularly to discuss classical and the latest papers in optimization and control. This opportunity is open to UC San Diego students. Feel free to join if you're interested! To foster meaningful discussions, we kindly encourage participants to read the assigned papers prior to the group session.

For winter 2024, the reading group takes place on Wednesdays from 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm at FAH 3009.

You can find the schedule here (also see this one).

Group Meeting

We meet biweekly to update the progress of each group member's work.

Seminars

We also invite speakers from outside the lab to share their insights and research findings.

Additionally, some of these seminars are jointly listed with Control & Pizza (Co-PI) Seminars on Optimization, Control, and Learning, which is co-organized with a few other faculty members from the ECE and MAE departments. Check the schedule: Co-PI seminars.

Past talks include:

2024

Date Speaker Title Location
11:00 am - 12:00 pm, Mar 11 Han Wang (Columbia) Heterogeneity versus performance tradeoffs in collaborative learning problems FAH 4009
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Mar 08 Jiachen Qian (Peking Univ.) Precise Theoretical Analysis of Distributed Filtering Zoom
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm, Feb 28 Liwei Jiang (Cornell) A nearly linearly convergent gradient method for “typical” nonsmooth functions FAH 3009 (Zoom)
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm, Feb 14 Yiheng Lin (Caltech) Online Policy Optimization in Nonlinear Time-Varying Systems FAH 3009 (Zoom)
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Feb 07 Palma London (UCSD) Frameworks for High Dimensional Optimization FAH 4002
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Jan 24 Libin Zhu (UCSD) Spikes in the training loss of SGD, catapults and feature learning FAH 4002

2023

Date Speaker Title Location
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Nov 01 Chaoyue Liu (UCSD) Transition to linearity and an optimization theory for wide neural networks FAH 3002
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Oct 18 Harsh Sharma (UCSD) Structure-preserving Learning of Reduced-order Models for Large-scale Dynamical Systems FAH 3002
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Sep 06 Masih Haseli (UCSD) Learning Koopman Eigenfunctions and Invariant Subspaces from Data FAH 3002
10:00 am - 11:00 am, Aug 25 Yingzhao Lian (EPFL) A Deeper Look into Data-enabled Predictive Control FAH 3009 (Zoom)
10:00 am - 11:00 am, Jul 27 Yuwen Chen (Univ. of Oxford) Large-scale Optimization for Convex Conic Problems FAH 3009 (Zoom)
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm,   Jul 07 Shiqi Zhang (City Univ. of Hong Kong)Distributed Optimization: A Frequency-Domain Framework FAH 3009 (Zoom)
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Jun 23 Jianglin Lan (Univ. of Glasgow) Safety Monitoring and Alert for Neural Network-Enabled Control Systems FAH 3009
11:00 am - 12:00 pm, May 29 Jared Miller (Northeastern Univ.) Data-Driven Safety Quantification using Infinite-Dimensional Robust Convex Optimization FAH 3009
12:00 pm -1:00 pm, Mar 15 Ya-Chien Chang (UCSD) Towards Rigorous Data-driven Control FAH 3009
12:00 pm -1:00 pm, Mar 01 Xingang Guo (UIUC) Direct Policy Search for State-feedback Hinf Robust Control Synthesis FAH 3009 (Zoom)
12:00 pm -1:00 pm, Feb 01 Jaap Eising (UCSD) Data-driven control and data informativity FAH 3009