Simon Barke was born in Germany where he studied physics. For a while, he lived in Moshi, Tanzania, and worked at different local schools and universities. Over the last decade, he has had the privilege to be involved in a number of exciting projects. He was a scientific monitor at the LIGO gravitational wave detector in Livingston, Louisiana. He got his PhD for research on low-frequency gravitational wave observatories in space at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany, with a focus on inter-spacecraft frequency distribution for LISA, the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna by the European Space Agency. He then moved to the University of Florida where he conducted research at the Department of Physics on the detection mechanism for ALPS, a dark matter generator and detector that is under construction at the German Electron Synchrotron DESY (Hamburg, Germany). Currently Simon works at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering on the development of a LISA Charge Management device under NASA contract.
He also tried to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, plays online games, and cannot sing (at all).
Education
Doctor rerum naturalium (physics)
Teaching Interests
Limiting fundamental and technical noise sources for ground and space-based gravitational wave observatories
Research Interests
Ultra-low-frequency noise of custom and COTS devices (electronics, electro-optics, lasers), flight hardware development for space missions, mission concepts for future gravitational wave observatories
Dan Guralnik received his Ph.D. from the Technion-IIT Mathematics department in 2005, specializing in Geometric Group Theory. After post-doctoral appointments at Vanderbilt University and University of Oklahoma, where he worked on asymptotic geometry and boundary dynamics of discrete groups, he moved in 2011 to a post-doctoral appointment at KodLab, the legged locomotion laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, to start work on applications of topology and category theory to problems of knowledge representation in the context of navigation and control. In fall 2019 he has joined NCR as a research scientist to work on developing formal and category-theoretical methods in hybrid control, as part of the AFOSR Center of Excellence in Assured Autonomy in Contested Environments.
Education
Ph.D. Mathematics (Technion-IIT)
Professional Memberships and Fellowships
American Mathematical Society, Member
Teaching Interests
Algebra (linear, group theory, commutative algebra), Analysis/Calculus, Topology (point-set and algebraic), topics courses on connection of algebra and topology in control.
Research Interests
Hybrid dynamical systems theory from a category-theoretic viewpoint; mobile agent networks; general artificial intelligence and learning from the point of view of internal representations; finite metric geometry and quantization (e.g. clustering); geometric group theory and its applications; asymptotic invariants of non-positively curved groups and continua theory.
Research Interests:
Nonlinear Control, Adaptive Control, AI-Based Control Methods, Multi-Agent Systems
Selected Publications:
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O. Patil, R. Kamalapurkar, and W. Dixon, ”A saturated RISE controller with exponential
stability guarantees,” IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, 2025. -
O. Patil, D. Le, E. Griffis, and W. Dixon, ”Lyapunov-based deep residual neural
network (ResNet) adaptive control,” IEEE Access, 2025. -
O. Patil, R. Sun, S. Bhasin, and W. E. Dixon, ”Adaptive control of time-varying parameter systemswith asymptotic tracking,” IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, vol. 67, no. 9, pp. 4809–4815, 2022.
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O. Patil, D. Le, M. Greene, and W. E. Dixon, ”Lyapunov-derived control and adaptiveupdate laws for inner and outer layer weights of a deep neural network,” IEEE Control Syst Lett., vol. 6,pp. 1855–1860, 2022.
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W. Makumi, O. Patil, and W. Dixon, ”Lyapunov-based adaptive deep learning for
approximate dynamic programming,” Automatica, vol. 180, p. 112462, 2025.
Notable Awards:
Graduate Student Research Award, University of Florida, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 2023
Humberto Ramos was born in Zacatecas, Mexico where he obtained his Bachelor’s in Mechatronics Engineering. From 2010 to 2012 he served as engineering director at a mining company where he led the development of electronic consoles for explosive detonation sequences. In 2012 he returned to academia as a professor of controls and mechatronic design. In 2020 he obtained his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University. During his graduate studies at the Land Air and Space Robotics (LASR) laboratory, he explored computer vision algorithms for relative navigation for space proximity operations and visual-aided inertial navigation systems for GPS-denied navigation applications. In 2020 he joined the Mechanical and Aerospace department at the University of Florida as a postdoctoral researcher, sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory. During this time he developed new robust algorithms that extended the practical applicability of the Kalman filter. In 2023 he became a research scientist and manager of the Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory at the Research Education and Engineering Facility (REEF) in Shalimar, Florida. Here he continues collaborations with the Air Force Research Laboratory on GPS-denied navigation systems for Guidance, Navigation, and Control applications.
Education
2010 Bachelors in Mechatronics Engineering, Polytechnic University of Zacatecas
2020 Ph.D. Aerospace Engineering, Texas A&M University
Teaching Interests
Optimal state estimation
Mechatronics design
GPS-denied navigation systems
Control theory
Professional Memberships and Fellowships
American Physical Society, Member