Kyriakos G Vamvoudakis

Dutton-Ducoffe Endowed Professor
Email Address
Telephone
Office Building
Montgomery Knight
Office Room Number
415B
Biography

Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis was born in Athens, Greece. He received the Diploma (a 5-year degree, equivalent to a Master of Science) in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece in 2006 with highest honors. After moving to the United States of America, he studied at The University of Texas at Arlington with Frank L. Lewis as his advisor, and he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2008 and 2011 respectively. From May 2011 to January 2012, he was working as an Adjunct Professor and Faculty Research Associate at the University of Texas at Arlington and at the Automation and Robotics Research Institute. During the period from 2012 to 2016 he was project research scientist at the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an assistant professor at the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech until 2018.

He currently serves as the Dutton-Ducoffe Endowed Professor and Associate Professor at The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He holds a secondary appointment in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His expertise is in reinforcement learning, control theory, game theory, cyber-physical security, bounded rationality, and safe/assured autonomy.

Dr. Vamvoudakis is the recipient of a 2019 ARO YIP award, a 2018 NSF CAREER award, a 2018 DoD Minerva Research Initiative Award, a 2021 GT Chapter Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award and his work has been recognized with best paper nominations and several international awards including the 2016 International Neural Network Society Young Investigator (INNS) Award, the Best Paper Award for Autonomous/Unmanned Vehicles at the 27th Army Science Conference in 2010, the Best Presentation Award at the World Congress of Computational Intelligence in 2010, and the Best Researcher Award from the Automation and Robotics Research Institute in 2011. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Golden Key honor societies and is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in America.

He has also served on various international program committees and has organized special sessions, workshops, and tutorials for several international conferences. He currently is a member of the Technical Committee on Intelligent Control of the IEEE Control Systems Society, a member of the Technical Committee on Adaptive Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board, an Associate Editor of: Automatica; IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control; IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems; IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems; IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence; Neurocomputing; Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications; and of Frontiers in Control Engineering-Adaptive, Robust and Fault Tolerant Control. He had also served as a Guest Editor for, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (Special issue on Learning from Imperfect Data for Industrial Automation); IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (Special issue on Reinforcement Learning Based Control: Data-Efficient and Resilient Methods); IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (Special issue on Industrial Artificial Intelligence for Smart Manufacturing); and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (Special issue on Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management). He is also a registered Electrical/Computer engineer (PE), a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, and a Senior Member of both IEEE and AIAA.

Research

Lab/Collaborations:

  • Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM)
  • Decision and Control Lab
  • The Center for Machine Learning
  • Institute of Information Security and Privacy

Disciplines:

  • Flight Mechanics & Controls

AE Multidisciplinary Research Areas:

  • Cyberphysical Systems, Safety, and Reliability
  • Robotics, Autonomy, and Human Interactions
Education

Ph.D., Electrical EngineeringAutomation and Robotics Research InstituteUniversity of Texas at Arlington, USA (2008-2011)
Dissertation: Online Learning Algorithms for Differential Dynamic Games and Optimal Control

M.Sc., Electrical EngineeringAutomation and Robotics Research InstituteUniversity of Texas at Arlington, USA (2006-2008)

Diploma (5 year degree, M.Sc. equivalent), Electronic and Computer EngineeringTechnical University of Crete, Greece (2001-2006)
Thesis: Adaptive Control for Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Cascade Models Using Radial Basis Function Neural Networks

Distinctions & Awards
  • Associate Fellow of AIAA - Class of 2024 
  • Georgia Tech Chapter of Sigma Xi, Young Faculty Award, 2021
  • ARO YIP Award, 2019
  • Senior Member of AIAA, 2019
  • NSF CAREER Award, 2018
  • Paper recognized as one of the Google Scholar Classic Papers in the area of Automation and Control Theory, 2018
  • International Neural Network Society (INNS) Young Investigator Award, 2016
  • Senior Member of IEEE, 2015
  • Inclusion of the 2010 Automatica paper in the IFAC Virtual Special Issue of Annual Reviews in Control (This virtual special issue highlights papers published between 2010 and 2013 that have appeared in the six journals of the IFAC), as one of the papers with the highest citation rates in the control field, 2014
  • Certificates for Four Research Articles Featured in ScienceDirect Top-25 List of Most Popular (Hottest) Articles in Automatica, Elsevier, 2010-2013
  • Honor by the Office of the Provost and the University Library for Creative Works and Awards, University of Texas at Arlington, 2011
  • Best Researcher Award, Automation and Robotics Research Institute, 2011
  • Best Paper Award for Autonomous/Unmanned Vehicles, 27th Army Science Conference, Orlando, December 2010
  • Best Presentation Award at the World Congress of Computational Intelligence, Barcelona, July 2010
  • Honors for every of the six years high school education from the Greek Ministry of Education (GPA 3.92/4)