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Laboratory for Control, Optimization, and Power

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Javad Lavaei

Associate Professor

Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research

University of California, Berkeley

Email: lavaei (at) berkeley.edu

Office: 4121 Etcheverry

Phone Number: 510-642-2497

Brief Biography

Javad Lavaei works on various interdisciplinary problems in control theory, optimization theory, power systems, and machine learning.

News

  • April 2025: Donghao Ying defended his PhD dissertation.

  • April 2025: Baturalp Yalcin defended his PhD dissertation.

  • March 2025: Yuchen Fang has joined my group as a PhD student.

  • October 2024: I gave a keynote at the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering.

  • September 2024: I received a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study polynomial optimization and machine learning applications.

  • September 2024: Prof. Sojoudi and I received a grant from the Army Research Office to study learning over networks.

  • August 2024: I have been named a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

  • May 2024: Haixiang Zhang has completed his PhD and received the 2024 Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics (this award is established in 1966 and given to a graduating student enrolled in any department at Berkeley who has demonstrated substantial research in applied mathematics).

  • November 2023: Prof. Ming Jin and I received a grant from NSF to study AI for power systems.

  • November 2023: I have been appointed as an IEEE Fellow Committee Member.

  • April 2023: Yuhao Ding defended his PhD dissertation.

  • December 2022: I was named a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA).

  • December 2022: I have received the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize given by the Control Systems Society.

  • November 2022: I have been elevated to IEEE Fellow.

  • November 2022: Ying Chen has joined my group as a PhD student.

  • August 2022: Jihun Kim has joined my group as a PhD student.

  • August 2022: Eli Brock has joined my group as a PhD student (co-advised with Prof. Sojoudi).

  • May 2022: SangWoo Park will join New Jersey Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in Fall 2022.

  • May 2022: Igor Molybog will join University of Hawaii at Manoa as an assistant professor in January 2023.

  • May 2022: Igor Molybog defended his PhD dissertation.

  • May 2022: Julie Mulvaney-Kemp defended her PhD dissertation.

  • April 2022: Han Feng defended his PhD dissertation.

  • April 2022: SangWoo Park defended his PhD dissertation.

  • July 2021: Donghao Ying has joined my group as a PhD student.

  • June 2021: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.

  • October 2020: Video of our presentation on time-varying optimization for power systems: Video

  • October 2020: Video of our presentation on spurious solutions in machine learning: Video

  • July 2020: Ali Yekkehkhany has joined my group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • June 2020: My group will give a series of tutorial talks on control and optimization for machine learning at 2020 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications.

  • April 2020: I received a grant from the Army Research Office to study distributed control and reinforcement learning.

  • March 2020: Ming Jin will join Virginia Tech ECE as an assistant professor in Fall 2020.

  • February 2020: Salar Fattahi will join University of Michigan as an assistant professor in Fall 2020.

  • January 2020: Yingjie Bi has joined my group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • May 2019: Richard Zhang will join University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in Fall 2019.

  • April 2019: Cedric Josz will join Columbia University as an assistant professor in Fall 2019.

  • October 2018: The Berkeley team led by Professor Somayeh Sojoudi, and co-led by Professor Shmuel Oren and myself, have been selected to receive funding to participate in the ARPA-E $4M Cash Prize competition on grid optimization (link 1, link 2)

  • September 2018: I will deliver a distinguished lecture at the 31st Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC).

  • September 2018: Professor Somayeh Sojoudi, Professor Kameshwar Poolla and I have received a seed grant from the Siebel Energy Institute for the project “Secure Data Analysis Tools to Accelerate Efficiency, Resiliency, and Sustainability of Power Systems”.

  • August 2018: Yuhao Ding has joined my group as a PhD student.

  • August 2018: Professor Alper Atamturk and I have received a grant on mixed-integer problems in energy systems from National Science Foundation.

  • July 2018: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

  • June 2018: I have been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

  • December 2017: Ming Jin has joined my group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • November 2017: Reza Mohammadi has joined my group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • July 2017: The video of my talk for the SIAG Prize Lecture is available here.

  • July 2017: Our group has organized the sessions “Control and Optimization Techniques for Power Systems I” and “Control and Optimization Techniques for Power Systems II” for INFORMS Annual Meeting 2017, and will give four talks.

  • July 2017: Professor Shmuel Oren and I have been selected to receive a $450K grant from the Department of the Army.

  • July 2017: Yu Zhang has joined the Electrical Engineering Department at University of California–Santa Cruz as an assistant professor.

  • May 2017: I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Letters.

  • April 2017: I will give a keynote presentation in the symposium “Signal and Information Processing for Smart Grid Infrastructure” at IEEE GlobalSIP 2017.

  • April 2017: I have been selected to receive a DARPA Director's Fellowship (total: ~$250,000).

  • April 2017: Han Feng joined our group as a PhD student.

  • December 2016: New solver (implemented in C++ ) for large-scale semidefinite programs: “Sparse SDP Solver”

  • November 2016: SangWoo Park joined our group as a PhD student.

  • October 2016: Richard Zhang joined our group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • October 2016: I received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award.

  • June 2016: Our group has organized the sessions “Efficient Optimization Methods for Power Systems” and “Large-scale Semidefinite Programs” for INFORMS International Conference.

  • May 2016: Ramtin Madani will join the Electrical Engineering Department at University of Texas–Arlington as an assistant professor in September 2016.

  • May 2016: I'm the guest editor-in-chief for the special issue “Distributed Control and Efficient Optimization Methods for Smart Grid” for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (call for papers).

  • April 2016: Abdulrahman Kalbat started a faculty job at United Arab Emirates University.

  • January 2016: Yu Zhang joined our group as a postdoctoral scholar.

  • November 2015: Abdulrahman Kalbat successfully defended his PhD.

  • November 215: Talk for receiving the INFORMS Optimization Society Prize for Young Researchers: Slides

  • September 2015: Ramtin Madani successfully defended his PhD.

  • August 2015: I received a DARPA Young Faculty Award.

  • July 2015: My proposal joint with Professor Shmuel Oren has been selected to receive a seed grant by the Siebel Energy Institute.

  • May 2015: My paper “Zero Duality Gap in Optimal Power Flow Problem” joint work with Professor Steven Low has been selected to receive a PSACE (Power System Analysis Computing and Economics) Technical Committee Prize Paper Award at the 2015 PES General Meeting.

  • May 2015: Ramtin Madani won a Research Award from Electrical Engineering of Columbia University.

  • April 2015: Two talks at MIT (LIDS and Civil Engineering): New Slides

  • January 2015: Moretza Ashraphijuo joined our research group and Ghazal Fazelnia graduated with an MS degree.

  • January 2015: Talk at Los Alamos Workshop on a new method for solving power flow equations for arbitrary networks

  • January 2015: Appointed as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid

  • December 2014: Guest associate editor for the special issue “Theory of Complex Systems with Applications to Smart Grid Operations” for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (call for papers)

  • October 2014: Talks at UC Berkeley, Stanford, UT Austin, Texas, and CMU A&M (slides)

  • September 2014: Organizer of a full-day symposium for 7-10th grade students (see here)

  • August 2014: A short video explaining my research on power systems (thanks to Resnick Institute)

  • August 2014: Slides for my talk at MOPTA (Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications, Lehigh University) and PES General Meeting: click here

  • August 2014: Salar Fattahi joined our research group.

  • August 2014: Our collaborative project with UT Austin was funded by NSF EPCN.

  • July 2014: Our OPF solver posted online. It may be used to find a global or near-global solution for a large-scale optimal power flow problem (click here).

  • July 2014: Our ODC solver posted online. It may be used to find a global or near-global optimal distributed controller (click here).

  • July 2014: Co-organizing the panel “The Future of OPF Algorithms” for IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting 2014.

  • June 2014: Talks at Google, New York Independent System Operator, and UC Berkeley (see the slides here)

  • May 2014: I was invited to participate in National Academy of Engineering's 2014 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

  • April 2014: I received the ONR YIP Award (read more here).

  • April 2014: Talks at NYU, Iowa State University, and IBM Ireland (see the slides here)

  • January 2014: I received the NSF CAREER Award.

  • January 2014: Gahzal Fazelnia is one of the 10 students in the US and Canada to receive the highly competitive 2014 Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship.

  • December 2013: Talks at UCLA, Google, and IBM (new results on three problems of low-rank LMI, polynomial optimization and distributed control; see the slides here)

  • September 2013: I will serve as a co-chair for the symposium “Demand Response and Dynamic Pricing” in SmartGridComm 2014.

  • August 2013: Talk at ABB (new results on penalized SDP for power optimization; see the slides here)

  • August 2013: Ghazal Fazelnia joined our research group.

  • August 2013: I received Google Faculty Research Award for my energy optimization work.

  • August 2013: The paper “Optimal Decentralized Control Problem as A Rank-Constrained Optimization” to appear in Allerton 2013.

  • July 2013: To learn about my current research, please read here.

  • July 2013: Appointed as a Conference Editorial Board (CEB) Associated Editor for European Control Association

  • July 2013: Member of the program committee for Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control 2014.

  • July 2013: Our invited session “Control and Optimization for Smart Grid” got accepted for IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2013.

  • June 2013: Appointed as a Conference Editorial Board (CEB) Associated Editor for IEEE Control Systems Society

  • May 2013: Member of the Technical Program Committee for IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, Symposium: Smart Grid Services and Management Models

  • May 2013: Member of the Technical Program Committee for IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, Symposium: Support for Storage, Renewable Resources and Micro-grids

  • May 2013: Member of the Technical Program Committee for IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, Symposium: The Whole Picture - Sense, Communicate, Compute, Control

  • Mar 2013: Two talks at University of Wisconsin–Madison: Optimization (Slides) and Power (Slides)

  • Jan 2013: Talks at Caltech, UC Berkeley and Stanford (Slides)

  • Jan 2013: Ramtin Madani joined my research group

  • Jan 2013: Member of the International Program Committee for 2013 IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control.

  • Dec 2012: Associate editor for [http:www.tandfonline.comloitssc

  • Dec 2012: Members of International Program Committee for European Control Conference 2013

  • Dec 2012: Talk at CDC 2012 in the workshop “Robust and Stochastic Control Methods for Sustainable Engineering”