Dr. Ye Zhao started as an Assistant Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in January 2019. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and obtained his Ph.D. from UT Austin, where he worked on robust motion planning and decision-making for robot manipulation and locomotion problems with frictional contact behaviors. At Georgia Tech, he directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots. His research interests lie broadly in planning, control, decision-making, and learning algorithms of highly agile, contact-rich, and human-cooperative robots. Dr. Zhao is especially interested in computationally efficient optimization algorithms and formal methods for challenging robotics problems with formal guarantees on robustness, safety, autonomy, and real-time performance. The LIDAR group aims at pushing the boundary of robot autonomy, intelligent decision, robust motion planning, and symbolic planning. The long-term goal is to devise theoretical and algorithmic underpinnings for collaborative humanoid and mobile robots operating in unstructured and unpredictable environments while working alongside humans. Robotic applications primarily focus on agile bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion, manipulation, heterogeneous robot teaming, and mobile platforms for extreme environment maneuvering.

Alenka Zajic is currently the Ken Byers Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia, in 2001 and 2003, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2008. Before joining Georgia Tech as an assistant professor, Zajic was a post-doctoral fellow in the Naval Research Laboratory and visiting faculty in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Zajic is the recipient of the following awards: IEEE Atlanta Section Outstanding Engineer Award (2019), The Best Poster Award at the IEEE International Conference on RFID (2018), NSF CAREER Award (2017), Best Paper Award at the 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (2016), the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Communications and Electronics (2014), Neal Shepherd Memorial Best Propagation Paper Award (2012), the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Telecommunications (2008), the Best Student Paper Award at the Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (2007), IEEE Outstanding Chapter Award as a Chair of the Atlanta Chapter of the AP/MTT Societies (2016), LexisNexis Dean's Excellence Award (2016), and Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award (2016). She was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications 2012-2017 and an executive editor for Wiley Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2011-2016 .

Professor Yezzi was born in Gainsville, Florida and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He obtained both his Bachelor's degree and his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota with minors in mathematics and music. After completing his Ph.D., he continued his research as a post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. His research interests fall broadly within the fields of image processing and computer vision. In particular he is interested in curve and surface evolution theory and partial differential equation techniques as they apply to topics within these fields (such as segmentation, image smoothing and enhancement, optical flow, stereo disparity, shape from shading, object recognition, and visual tracking). Much of Dr. Yezzi's work is particularly tailored to problems in medical imaging, including cardiac ultrasound, MRI, and CT. He joined the Georgia Tech faculty in the fall of 1999 where he has taught courses in DSP and is working to develop advanced courses in computer vision and medical image processing. Professor Yezzi consults with industry in the areas of visual inspection and medical imaging. His hobbies include classical guitar, opera, and martial arts.

Erik I. Verriest received the degree of 'Burgerlijk Electrotechnisch Ingenieur' from the State University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium in 1973, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1975 and 1980, respectively. He was employed by the Control Systems Laboratory and the Hybrid Computation Centre, Ghent, Belgium, where he worked on process simulation and control in 1973-74. His doctoral research at Stanford was on the algebraic theory and balancing for time varying linear systems and array algorithms. He joined the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in 1980. He spent the 1991-92, 1993-94 and 1994-95 academic years at Georgia Tech Lorraine. He has contributed to the application of the theory of systems over finite fields in cryptography, data compression, sensitivity analysis of array algorithms with applications in estimation and control, algorithms for optical computing. More recently he contributed to the theory of periodic and hybrid systems, delay - differential systems, model reduction for nonlinear systems, and control with communication constraints. He served on several IPC's and is a member of the IFAC Committee on Linear Systems.

Patricio Vela was born in Mexico City, Mexico and grew up in California. He earned his bachelor of science degree in 1998 and his doctorate in 2003 at the California Institute of Technology, where he did his graduate research on geometric nonlinear control androbotics. Dr. Vela came to Georgia Tech as a post-doctoral researcher in computer vision and joined the ECE faculty in 2005. His research interests lie in the geometric perspectives to control theory and computer vision. Recently, he has been interested in the role that computer vision can play for achieving control-theoretic objectives of (semi-)autonomous systems. His research also covers control of nonlinear systems, typically robotic systems.

Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis was born in Athens, Greece. He received the Diploma (a 5 year degree, equivalent to a Master of Science) in Electronic and Computer Engineering from Technical University of Crete, Greece in 2006 with highest honors. After moving to the United States of America, he studied at The University of Texas at Arlington with Frank L. Lewis as his advisor and he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2008 and 2011 respectively. From May 2011 to January 2012, he was working as an Adjunct Professor and Faculty Research Associate at the University of Texas at Arlington and at the Automation and Robotics Research Institute. During the period from 2012 to 2016 he was a project research scientist at the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an assistant professor at the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech until 2018. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor at The School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research interests include approxIMaTe dynamic programming, game theory, and optimal control. Recently, his research has focused on cyber-physical security, networked control, smart grid and multi-agent optimization. Dr. Vamvoudakis is the recipient of a 2019 ARO YIP award, a 2018 NSF CAREER award, and of several international awards including the 2016 International Neural Network Society Young Investigator (INNS) Award, the Best Paper Award for Autonomous/Unmanned Vehicles at the 27th Army Science Conference in 2010, the Best Presentation Award at the World Congress of Computational Intelligence in 2010, and the Best Researcher Award from the Automation and Robotics Research Institute in 2011. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu and Golden Key honor societies and is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in America. He has also served on various international program committees and has organized special sessions for several international conferences. He currently is a member of the Technical Committee on Intelligent Control of the IEEE Control Systems Society (TCIC), a member of the Technical Committee on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (ADPRLTC), an Associate Editor of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, an Editor in Chief of the Communications in Control Science and Engineering, a registered Electrical/Computer engineer (PE) and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Dr. Tsiotras holds the David & Andrew Lewis Endowed Chair in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also associate director at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. His current research interests include nonlinear and optimal control and their connections with AI, planning, and decision-making, emphasizing autonomous ground, aerial, and space vehicles applications. He has published more than 350 journal and conference articles in these areas. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr. Tsiotras was an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia. He has also held visiting appointments with the MIT, JPL, INRIA, Rocquencourt, the Laboratoire de Automatique de Grenoble, and the Ecole des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech). Dr. Tsiotras is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the IEEE Technical Excellence Award in Aerospace Controls, the Outstanding Aerospace Engineer Award from Purdue, the Sigma Xi President and Visitor's Award for Excellence in Research, as well as numerous other fellowships and scholarships. He is currently the chief editor of the Frontiers in Robotics & AI, in the area of space robotics, and an associate editor for the Dynamic Games and Applications journal. In the past, he has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and the Journal of Dynamical and Control Systems. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, IEEE, and AAS.

Evangelos Theodorou earned his Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece in 2001. He has also received a MSc in Production Engineering from TUC in 2003, a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Minnesota in spring of 2007 and a MSc in Electrical Engineering on dynamics and controls from the University of Southern California(USC) in Spring 2010. In May of 2011 he graduated with his Ph.D., in Computer Science at USC. After his Ph.D., he became a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. In July 2013 he joined the faculty of the school of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor. His theoretical research spans the areas of control theory, machine learning, information theory and statistical physics. Applications involve autonomous planning and control in robotics and aerospace systems, bio-inspired control and design.