Biography
Luca Furieri joined the University of Oxford as an Associate Professor in 2025. He is also a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering at St Hugh’s College. Previously, he held a position as Principal Investigator at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he was awarded an Ambizione grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2020 from ETH Zurich. His work has been recognised with the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Best Paper Award and the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award.
Current Research Projects
- Reinforcement Learning with Guarantees: Developing a neural system-level synthesis perspective to learn over safe and stable closed-loop behaviors.
- Distributed Control of Networked Systems: Designing modular control policies for networks of systems, from linear to nonlinear settings.
- Learning-based Optimization: Enhancing the performance of legacy solvers through neural network components without compromising worst-case convergence guarantees.
Research Interests
- Networked Control with Safety and Stability Guarantees
Large-scale networked systems, such as autonomous vehicle fleets and power grids, require many interacting agents to coordinate sensing, actuation, and communication in real time. Luca's group designs learning-based control frameworks that scale to these complex environments while preserving fundamental safety and stability guarantees, without introducing unnecessary conservatism.
- System Theory for Algorithm Design
Many engineering problems involve solving optimization tasks rapidly and reliably. System and control theory offer a principled toolkit to design optimization algorithms with formal guarantees on convergence, speed, and robustness. Luca's group develops enhanced optimization and machine learning algorithms by leveraging nonlinear system theory and integrating neural network components.
