Education:

University of Pennsylvania
PhD Electrical and Systems Engineering ’18
MS Electrical Engineering ’16

Wharton School of Business – University of Pennsylvania
MA Statistics ’16

National Technical University of Athens
Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering ’12

Teaching: ^top

Starting in January 2021

Research Interests: ^top

Trustworthy Collaborative Autonomy:

• Learning for Control
• Robotic Perception
• Combinatorial and Distributed Optimization
• Adaptive, Self-Reconfigurable Systems

Biography: ^top

Vasileios Tzoumas received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (2018). He holds a Master of Arts in Statistics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (2016); a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania (2016); and a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (2012).

Vasileios starts as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in January 2021. Currently, he is a research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he previously was a post-doctoral associate for one year (2018-2019). In 2017, he was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT.

Vasileios works on control, learning, and perception, as well as combinatorial and distributed optimization, with applications to robotics, cyber-physical systems, and self-reconfigurable aerospace systems.  He aims for trustworthy collaborative autonomy.  His work includes foundational results on robust and adaptive combinatorial optimization, with applications to multi-robot information gathering for resiliency against robot failures and adversarial removals.

Vasileios is a recipient of the Best Paper Award in Robotic Vision at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), and was a Best Student Paper Award finalist at the 2017 IEEE Conference in Decision and Control (CDC).

Awards: ^top

HONORS AND SOCIETIES

• Best Paper Award in Robot Vision, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020
• Best Student Paper Award Finalist, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2017
• Interview article “Algorithms that protect” MIT LIDS|ALL Magazine, Vol. 5, 2019
• Best Presentation in Session Award, American Control Conference (ACC), 2016
• Best Presentation in Session Award, American Control Conference (ACC), 2015

SOCIETY MEMBERSHIPS

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)

Publications: ^top

Full List of Publications

1. V. Tzoumas, A. Jadbabaie, G. J. Pappas, “Robust and Adaptive Sequential Submodular Optimization,” under review in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC), 2020.
2. P. Antonante,* V. Tzoumas,* H. Yang, L. Carlone, “Outlier-Robust Estimation: Hardness, Minimally-Tuned Algorithms, and Robotics Applications,” under review in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO), 2020.
   *Equal contribution.
3. H. Yang, P. Antonante, V. Tzoumas, L. Carlone, “Graduated Non-Convexity for Robust Spatial Perception: From Non-Minimal Solvers to Global Outlier Rejection,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), Vol. 5, 2019, No. 2, 2020. (Best Paper Award in Robotic Vision, ICRA 2020)
4. V. Tzoumas, L. Carlone, G. J. Pappas, A. Jadbabaie, “LQG Control and Sensing Co-Design,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC), 2020, in press.
5. B. Schlotfeldt, V. Tzoumas, D. Thakur, G. J. Pappas, “Resilient Active Information Gathering with Mobile Robots,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018.
6. V. Tzoumas, K. Gatsis, A. Jadbabaie, G. J. Pappas, “Resilient Monotone Submodular Function Maximization,” 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2017. (Best Student Paper Award Finalist, CDC 2017)