I’m a second-year PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Melkior Ornik at the LEADCAT group.
I am broadly interested in problems in control, learning and optimization. I am currently focused on optimal control and reachability for systems whose dynamics are affected by system faults or adversaries. In relation to this, I am working on guaranteeing resilience, safety, and optimality for nonlinear systems in such environments.
I am also working on a game-theoretic viewpoint on resilience to adversarial attacks, and problems relating to deceiving adversaries in stochastic control systems. I plan to think about applications in cyber-physical networks, such as large-scale traffic systems soon.
I received my MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where I worked with Prof. Peter Seiler on analyzing the effect of varying step sizes on the convergence and noise amplification of gradient descent.
You can find my CV here, and my Google Scholar page here.
Contact: 360 Coordinated Science Laboratory, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Email: ramp3 [at] illinois [dot] edu
Education
Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering (Current)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.
Advisor: Prof. Melkior OrnikM.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2023
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Advisor: Prof. Peter SeilerB.Tech Electronics and Communication Engineering, 2021
PES University, Bengaluru, India.
Advisors: Prof. Rajini Makam and Prof. Koshy George
Capstone Project: Adaptive Iterative Learning Control
News
April 13, 2025 — A new paper “Analysis of the Unscented Transform Controller for Systems with Bounded Nonlinearities,” is available on arXiv, and is primarily the work of an undergraduate student I mentored.
April 7, 2025 — Our paper “Energetic Resilience of Linear Driftless Systems” has been accepted for presentation at the 11th IFAC Symposium on Robust Control Design (ROCOND) in July!
March 17, 2025 — Submitted a new paper “Mode-Prefix-Based Control of Switched Linear Systems with Applications to Fault Tolerance”. This paper solves optimal control problems for switched systems (with arbitrary switching, either stochastic or potentially adversarial) by transforming them into convex programs using system level synthesis.
February 11, 2025 — Announcing a new paper “Approximate Energetic Resilience of Nonlinear Systems under Partial Loss of Control Authority” on arXiv. This is our first exploration into resilience under possible adversarial action for classical nonlinear systems.
December 19, 2024 — I was at the 63rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Milan, Italy this week, presenting our paper “How Much Reserve Fuel: Quantifying the Maximal Energy Cost of System Disturbances”. This forms some of the earliest work I conducted during my PhD.
October 2, 2024 — A new paper “Energetic Resilience of Linear Driftless Systems” is available on arXiv.
July 27, 2024 — Our article “Analysis of Gradient Descent with Varying Step Sizes using Integral Quadratic Constraints”, containing most of my MS work, has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control as a technical note!