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Alireza Karimi

EPFL STI IGM SCI-STI-AK
ME C2 407 (Bâtiment ME)
Station 9
1015 Lausanne

Expertise

System identification, robust control, data-driven controller tuning, Mechatronics, Control of electrical grids
Alireza Karimi received his B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1987 and 1990 from Amir Kabir University (Tehran Polytechnic). After 3 years of industrial experience he joined Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG) in France and received his DEA and Ph. D. degrees both on Automatic Control in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He was Assistant Professor at Electrical Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology in Teheran from 1998 to 2000. He is currently Professor of Automatic Control and the Head of the Data-Driven Modelling and Control Group within the Institute of Mechanical Engineering of EPFL. His research interests include closed-loop identification, data-driven controller tuning approaches and robust control with application on mechatronic systems and electrical grids.

Academic activities

- Member of doctoral program in Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems.

Education

Automatic Control

| Robust and adaptive digital controller design

1993 – 1997 Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble

International Activities

- Associate Editor of European Journal of Control (2004-2013).
- Member of IFAC Technical Committee on Linear Systems and Robust Control.
- Member of IEEE-CSS Technical Committee on System Identification and Adaptive Control.
- Member of Award Selection Committee of IFAC World Congress 2011.
- IPC member of several international conferences (CIFA 2006, IEEE-MED 2008, CIFA 2012, IFAC-PID 2012, IFAC-SSSC 2013, IFAC-ACE 2016, IFAC-SSSC 2016, IFAC-WC 2017).
- Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society’s Conference Editorial Board, since 2018.
- Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology since 2026.

PhD Students

Vaibhav Gupta, Mert Eyuboglu, Zhaoming Qin, Vishnu Varadan, Elias Sebastian Klauser, Mahdi Mehdikhani Sarvjahany

Past EPFL PhD Students

Zlatko Emedi, Mahdieh Sadat Sad Abadi, Achille Nicoletti, Christoph Manuel Kammer, Seyed Sohail Madani, Philippe Louis Schuchert

Ljubisa Miskovic, Daniel Garcia, Marc Kunze, Mark Edward John Butcher, Gorka Galdos Sanz de Galdeano, Klaske van Heusden, Navid Asmari Saadabad

Courses

Advanced control systems

ME-524

This course covers some theoretical and practical aspects of robust and adaptive control. This includes H-2 and H-infinity control in model-based and data-driven framework by convex optimization, direct, indirect and switching adaptive control. The methods are implemented in a hands-on lab.

Control systems and discrete-time control

ME-326

This course includes modelling and analysis of dynamic systems, basic principles and analysis of feedback control systems, controller design in frequency domain (loop shaping) and in state space (linear quadratic regulator), discrete-time systems and digital controller design (polynomial approach).

System identification

ME-421

Identification of discrete-time linear models using experimental data is studied. The correlation method and spectral analysis are used to identify nonparametric models and the subspace and prediction error methods to estimate the plant and noise model parameters. Hands-on labs are included.