Welcome to SYSOS

Welcome to SySOS

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A group researching complex networked control systems, biological and technological

Research Areas

• Nonlinear systems analysis, Sum of Squares optimization and Lyapunov techniques.
• Systems and Synthetic Biology.
• Software Development.
• Large-scale Networked Systems analysis with communication and structural constraints.
• Fluid mechanics and Heat transfer, from a control perspective.
• Complexity reduction of networked systems.
• Scaling Sum of Squares and Semidefinite Programming.
• Robust analysis and design of (deep) neural network controllers.

Click here for a more detailed description of these research areas.

Members

• Professor Antonis Papachristodoulou - Academic

• Mr Patrick Green - DPhil candidate, July 2019-. Co-supervised with Professor Philip Poole.

• Mr Matthew Newton - DPhil Candidate, October 2019 -.

• Mr Emmanouil Alexis - DPhil Candidate, October 2019 -. Co-supervised with Professor Luca Cardelli.

• Mr Miroslav Gasparek - DPhil Candidate, October 2019 -. Co-supervised with Professor Harrison Steel.

• Mr Han Wang - DPhil Candidate, October 2020 -. Co-supervised with Professor Kostas Margellos.

• Mr Scott Stacey - DPhil Candidate, July 2021 -. Co-supervised with Professor Harrison Steel.

• Mr Bergthor Traustason - DPhil Candidate, July 2021 -. Co-supervised with Professor Philip Poole.

• Mr Liqun Zhao - DPhil Candidate, October 2021 -. Co-supervised with Dr Konstantinos Gatsis.

• Ms Olivia Tjahjono - Probationary Research Student, July 2022 -. Co-supervised with Professor Philip Poole.

• Mr Allan André do Nascimento - Probationary Research Student, October 2022 -. Co-supervised with Professor Kostas Margellos.

Here is a list of previous members.

News

• Many congratulations to Dr Luca Furieri, Dr Yang Zheng (see also updated website), Professor Maryam Kamgarpour and Professor Antonis Papachristodoulou who won the 2022 IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems best paper award for their paper Sparsity Invariance for Convex Design of Distributed Controllers.

• Huge congratulations to Dr Licio Romao for winning the 2021 IET Control and Automation Doctoral Prize for his thesis "Scalable and data-driven approaches to convex programming"! Licio will be giving a Webinar on his results - register now!
• Many congratulations to Dr Yang Zheng (see also updated website) who won the 2019 European PhD Award on Control for Complex and Heterogeneous Systems for his thesis "Chordal Sparsity in Control and Optimization of Large-scale Systems"!

• Chi.bio is released!

• Antonis Papachristodoulou is elevated to IEEE Fellow for his fundamental contributions to theory and applications of Sum of Squares Programming and networked control systems.

• Thomas Prescott is awarded the 2015 European PhD Award for the Control of Complex and Heterogeneous networks for his thesis Large-Scale Layered Systems and Synthetic Biology: Model Reduction and Decomposition.

• Richard Mason and Antonis Papachristodoulou are awarded the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award for their 2014 ACC paper on Chordal Sparsity, Decomposing SDPs and the Lyapunov Equation.

• Antonis Papachirstodoulou is awarded the 2015 European Control Award and will be giving a plenary at the 2015 European Control Conference.

For more news, click here.

Joining SySOS

• If you are an Oxford undergraduate interested in doing a summer internship on any of the above research directions (or anything else) get in touch.

• If you are finishing your undergraduate/masters degree and you want to apply for a DPhil (PhD) or MSc by Research in our group, then please contact us sooner than later to discuss possible projects. Note that there are several Centres of Doctoral Training that are relevant to our research, especially the Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP as well as the EPSRC CDT in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems. If you have a strong academic background, the chances of securing funding for your studies are higher the earlier you apply. Note that applications need to follow the Postgraduate Admissions guidelines.

• Any PDRA openings will be advertised on the departmental website. None are available now.

• There are several other routes for joining SySOS, mainly through fellowships. Please contact us to discuss.

Current and Previous Externally Funded Projects

• Single-cell control of microbial selection and evolution

• EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Synthetic Biology [1]

• EPSRC Fellowship for Growth in Synthetic Biology: Designing Feedback Control in Biology for Robustness and Scalability [2]

• Sum-of-Squares Approach to Global Stability and Control of Fluid Flows [3]

• Autonomous Behaviour and Learning in an Uncertain World [4]

• Control Engineering Inspired Design Tools for Synthetic Biology [5]

• Using Control Theory to Design Sustainable Policies for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Presence of Model Uncertainty [6]

• RoSBNet: Network in Synthetic Biology.

• European Space Agency project with GMV (Spain), NGC (Canada) and the University of Leicester, "Worst-Case and Safety Analysis Tools for Autonomous Rendezvous Systems".

• Control Theory Tools for Elucidating the Phosphotransfer Network in Rhodobacter sphaeroides: A Feasibility Study

• Oxford-Princeton Collaboration on Network Science with Professor Mung Chiang.

Collaborations

• Scaling Semidefinite Programming - Northeastern, USA
• Analysis of Partial Differential Equations Using Sum of Squares Programming - CentraleSupelec, France
• A Control Engineering Approach for Modelling High-Shear Flows - Johns Hopkins
• Designing bio-feedback control circuits using small RNA - Northumbria

Useful Links

• Engineering Science Control Group

• Doctoral Training Centres