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Courtesy Gioele ZardiniNovember 22, 2024
Gioele Zardini has received the Silver Medal of ETH Zurich for his 2023 doctoral thesis, “Co-Design of Complex Systems: From Autonomy to Future Mobility Systems”. Given annually, for outstanding dissertations, the award will be conferred at the ETH doctoral awards ceremony in January.
Zardini’s thesis explores the contemporary era struggles with the intricate challenge of designing and operating “complex systems.” Zardini not only offers an understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of this challenge, but also practical guidance for applying them to a diverse array of real-world problems, revolving around the domain of embodied intelligence. Presented as a toolbox, Zardini’s work empowers efficient computation of optimal design solutions tailored to specific tasks and, in its novelty, paves the way for several possibilities for future research.
Gioele Zardini is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Principal Investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and an Affiliate Faculty member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS)
He received his doctoral degree in 2024 from ETH Zurich, and holds both a BSc. and a MSc. in Mechanical Engineering and Robotics, Systems and control from ETH Zurich.
Before joining MIT as faculty, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and held various visiting positions at nuTonomy Singapore (then Aptiv, now Motional), Stanford, and MIT.
Driven by societal challenges, the goal of Zardini’s research is to develop efficient computational tools and algorithmic approaches to formulate and solve complex, interconnected system design and autonomous decision making problems. His interests include the co-design of complex systems, from future mobility systems to autonomous systems, compositionality in engineering, planning and control, and game theory.
He is the creator of Autonomy Talks, an ongoing international seminar series that promotes a diverse exchange of research on autonomy. Zardini is also a lead organizer for the IEEE ICRA workshop on “Compositional Robotics: Mathematics and Tools” and “Co-Design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems” at ITSC. He is the recipient of many awards including a paper award at the 4th Applied Category Theory Conference, Best Paper Award at the 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), along with research awards from the DoE, MIT, Sidara, and Amazon.
See the full list of Award Recipients and read Zardini’s Dissertation.