Gioele Zardini

Ph.D. Candidate
ETH Zurich
Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering
Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control

Incoming Assistant Professor (Fall 2024)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS)

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Prof. Emilio Frazzoli's group, at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich. I received my BSc. and MSc. in Mechanical Engineering with focus in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zurich in 2017 and 2019, respectively. I spent time in Singapore at nuTonomy (then Aptiv, now Motional), at Stanford University, in Prof. Marco Pavone's Autonomous Systems Lab, and at MIT.

Driven by societal challenges, the goal of my research is to develop efficient computational tools and algorithmic approaches to formulate and solve complex, interconnected system design and autonomous decision making problems. My interests include the co-design complex systems (all the way from future mobility systems to autonomous systems), compositionality in engineering, planning and control, and game theory. I am the recipient of an award (keynote talk) for our paper at the 2021 Applied Category Theory Conference, and of the Best Paper Award (1st Place) at the 2021 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC).

I created the Autonomy Talks at ETH Zurich. Check out our webpage, have a look at the (over 120) recorded talks and contact me if you want to be the next speaker!

If you want to know more about compositional engineering, check out our workshops, our webpage (containing our work-in-progress book, and many recorded lectures), and our papers.

I am thrilled to share that I will join MIT as a tenure-track assistant professor in Fall 2024. At MIT, I will be part of LIDS, CEE, and IDSS.
More information on my group and Ph.D. openings will follow soon!

Open projects

As a Ph.D. student, I supervise theses at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. Feel free to contact me if interested.
  • Smart Vehicles or Smart Cities? An Inside-Out Approach to AMoD (Master Thesis)
  • The logic of temporal resources and planning for embodied agents (Master Thesis)
  • Co-design and mobility games (Master Thesis)
  • Co-Design Applications in Engineering (Semester/Master Thesis)

    • Latest News


    05/24/2023 - I gave an invited talk at MIT Media Lab's Computational Social Science Seminar, hosted by Dr. Takahiro Yabe!
    05/08/2023 - Our tutorial on Computational Co-Design for Robotics has been accepted to IROS 2023, in Detroit!
    04/27/2023 - I gave an invited talk at MIT's JTL and Transit Groups, hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao.
    03/15/2023 - Both our workshop and special session on Co-Design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems have been accepted at ITSC'23. Bilbao, here we come!
    Jan-April'23 - I gave a bunch of job talks about Co-Design of Complex Systems at a number of places, including UW, MIT, UC Berkeley, UIUC, Cornell, Imperial College London, KTH, UCI, UBC, USC, and University of Michigan
    02/01/2023 - I'm in Boston until the end of May! I'm visiting Munther Dahleh's group at MIT.
    12/22/2022 - The third edition of our workshop on Compositional Robotics: Mathematics and Tools has been accepted at ICRA 2023. London here we come!
    12/01/2022 - I will be at CDC in Cancun, presenting our work on Task-Driven Modular Co-Design of Vehicle Control Systems, and participating to the poster session Meet the Faculty Candidates!
    11/19/2022 - Our paper Co-Design to Enable User-Friendly Tools to Assess the Impact of Future Mobility Systems has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.
    10/08/2022 - Check out the recordings of our ITSC 2022 Workshop on Co-Design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems, in Paris.
    08/26/2022 - I will give a talk on September 8 at the Seminaire d'Automatique du Plateau de Saclay, in Paris.
    08/25/2022 - Andrea Censi presented our recent paper on Categorification of Negative Information using Enrichment at a Topos Colloquium.
    07/15/2022 - Our paper Task-driven Modular Co-design of Vehicle Control Systems has been accepted to the 61th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and will be presented within the special session on Modular Design and Verification of Control Systems!
    06/30/2022 - Our paper Categorification of Negative Information using Enrichment has been accepted to the 5th Annual International Applied Category Theory Conference.
    06/07/2022 - We are the third winners in the Commonroad Motion Planning Competition for Autonomous Vehicles (at IV 2022)! Congratulations to our student Leon Zueger, who used a motion planner which lerverages posetal games!
    04/25/2022 - Happy to be in the program committee for the 5th International Applied Category Theory Conference. Hurry up and submit your paper by May 9 here !
    02/25/2022 - Our workshop on Co-Design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems has been accepted at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
    02/01/2022 - Our paper on Posetal Games (in the meanwhile published in IEEE RA-L) has been additionally selected for presentation at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
    12/21/2021 - The second edition of our workshop Compositional Robotics: Mathematics and Tools has been accepted to IEEE ICRA 2022!
    12/07/2021 - Our paper on Posetal Games has been accepted to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)!
    11/20/2021 - New preprint about posetal games applied to trajectory selection!
    09/27/2021 - Great news! Our paper Game Theory to Study Interactions between Mobility Stakeholders has won the Best Paper Award (1st Place) at 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.