LIDS Faculty Co-Organize Inaugural L4DC Conference

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere organized a new annual conference called Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC). The inaugural conference was hosted at MIT by the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

“We decided to launch L4DC because we felt the need to bring together the communities of machine learning, robotics, and systems and control theory,” said IDSS Associate Director Ali Jadbabaie, a conference co-organizer and professor in IDSS, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Pablo Parillo, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and faculty member of both IDSS and LIDS, was also a conference organizer, along with George Pappas of the University of Pennsylvania and Melanie Zellinger of ETH Zurich.

Over the two days of the conference, talks covered core topics from the foundations of learning of dynamics models, data-driven optimization for dynamical models and optimization for machine learning, reinforcement learning for physical systems, and reinforcement learning for both dynamical and control systems. Talks also featured examples of applications in fields like robotics, autonomy, and transportation systems. “How could self-driving cars change urban systems?” asked Cathy Wu, an assistant professor in CEE, IDSS, and LIDS, in a talk that investigated how transportation and urban systems may change over the next few decades. Only a small percentage of autonomous vehicles are needed to significantly affect traffic systems, Wu argued, which will in turn affect other urban systems.

L4DC was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, and the Army Research Office, a part of the Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (CCDC ARL).

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