SEC scholar 1 June 2025 – 31 August 2025
Adeel Akhtar is a tenure-track assistant professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), NJ, USA. Before joining NJIT, he held a short postdoctoral position at KAUST and held a postdoctoral researcher position at the Hybrid System Lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Before that, he held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed at Queen’s University Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo from the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering Department and MASc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in controls and robotics. His research interests include nonlinear controls, geometric controls, hybrid systems, and robotics.
The primary aim of this visit is to develop novel physics-informed learning based methods for hybrid dynamical systems and systems evolving on manifolds. The goal of this research is to address these challenges by developing data-driven control algorithms by incorporating the physics information, such as hybrid dynamics, and data to incorporate the uncertainties, and physics informed neural Lyapunov (PINN) algorithms, which provide theoretical guarantees and safety. Specifically, Taylor-neural Lyapunov functions will be designed for hybrid dynamical systems. These methods aim to integrate fundamental physical principles into data-driven algorithms, enhancing the safety, robustness, and adaptability of autonomous systems.
Contact: adeel.akhtar@njit.edu
