Abstract Lafortune will begin with a brief retrospective of the theory of supervisory control of discrete event systems, initiated in the seminal work of Ramadge & Wonham over 30 years ago, and compare it with recent work in formal methods in control. He will then present results from his group on two problems: (i) sensor…

Abstract Many procedures in statistics and artificial intelligence require solving non-convex problems. Historically, the focus has been to convexify the non-convex objectives. In recent years, however, there has been significant progress to optimize non-convex functions directly. This direct approach has led to provably good guarantees for specific problem instances such as latent variable models, non-negative…

Abstract A great deal of research in recent years has focused on robot learning. In many applications, guarantees that specifications are satisfied throughout the learning process are paramount. For the safety specification, we present a controller synthesis technique based on the computation of reachable sets using optimal control. We show recent results in system decomposition…