Francesco is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in the Empirical Inference Department, Tübingen (Germany) since April 2011. He received a Master degree in Science and Technology in 2007 from Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (Italy). He received a Master degree in Computer Science Engineering in 2007 and the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics and Statistics in 2011, both from the University of Pavia (Italy). He has held visiting positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Center for Biological and Computational Learning), National Taiwan University (Machine Learning Group), ETH Zürich (Machine Learning Laboratory), and Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo. His research interests include machine learning, optimization, non-linear control, system identification, regularization methods, and distributed computation.
Abdeslam is a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University since May 2013. He received an engineering degree in computer science from the École Nationale supérieure d'Informatique (ESI, Algeria) in October 2004, and a Master degree in computer science from Paris-Sud University (Orsay) in September 2005. During his studies at Paris-Sud, he was a research assistant at the INRIA Saclay institute, where he worked on fault-tolerance in Grid Computing. In January 2006, Abdeslam joined the group of Prof. Brahim Chaib-draa at Laval University (Canada), where he worked on decision-making in partially observable dynamical systems. He graduated with a Ph.D. degree in July 2010. From August 2010 to April 2013, he was a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in the Empirical Inference Department in Tübingen (Germany). His main research interests include planning under uncertainty, reinforcement learning, and robotics.
Lennart Ljung was born in 1946 in Malmö, Sweden, and received his Ph.D. in 1974 in Automatic Control from Lund Institute of Technology. He has been Professor of the chair of Automatic Control in Linköping since 1976. He is currently the director of the SSF Strategic Research Center "Modeling, Visualization and Information Integration" (MOVIII). Professor Ljung has held visiting positions at Stanford and MIT and has written several books on System Identification and Estimation. He is an IEEE Fellow, an IFAC Fellow and an IFAC Advisor as well as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Professor Ljung has received honorary doctorates from the Baltic State Technical University in St Petersburg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, from the Technical University of Troyes, France, from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. He is an honorary professor of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Science. In 2002 he received the Quazza Medal from IFAC, in 2003 he received the Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society, and he was the recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Award for 2007.