Nikolaus Vertovec

Nikolaus Vertovec

Junior Fellow in Artificial Intelligence

Oxford University

Biography

I’m a Career Development Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at St Hughs College, Oxford. I’m working on enforcing safety in AI, working closely with the Oxford Control & Verification group within the Department of Computer Science.

After receiving my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2019, I worked on the Mars2020 rover at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I completed my DPhil at Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science in 2024.

My research interests concern the verification of learned models and safety enforcement during the training of learning-based controllers for complex dynamical systems. My work has been applied to spacecraft trajectory design and airborne wind energy, among other applications.

Interests
  • Reachability analysis
  • Statistical learning theory
  • Decentralized and distributed control
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Airborne Wind Energy
Education
  • DPhil in Engineering Science

    Oxford University

  • BSc in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, 2019

    ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Intern
Oct 2019 – Mar 2010 Pasadena, USA
Worked on the Mars2020 Rover
 
 
 
 
 
Akademische Raumfahrtsinitiative Schweiz (ARIS)
GNC Engineer
Sep 2018 – Jul 2019 Zurich, Switzerland
Designed the Control Systems for a Sounding Rocket
 
 
 
 
 
ETH Zürich
Teaching Assistant
Feb 2019 – Jul 2019 Zurich, Switzerland
Taught Numerical Methods for second-year bachelor students

Recent Publications

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(2023). State Aggregation for Distributed Value Iteration in Dynamic Programming. In IEEE Control Systems Letters, vol. 7, pp. 2269–2274, 2023.

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(2023). Safety-Aware Hybrid Control of Airborne Wind Energy Systems. In Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 326–338, Feb. 2024.

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(2022). Multi-objective low-thrust spacecraft trajectory design using reachability analysis. In European Journal of Control, vol. 69, p. 100758, Jan. 2023.

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(2022). Verification of safety critical control policies using kernel methods. In 2022 European Control Conference (ECC), London, United Kingdom, 2022, pp. 1870-1875.

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(2021). Multi-objective minimum time optimal control for low-thrust trajectory design. In 2021 European Control Conference (ECC), Delft, Netherlands, 2021, pp. 1975-1980.

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