Necmiye Ozay receives IEEE CSS Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize

Necmiye Ozay, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded the 2021 Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) “for fundamental contributions to control and identification of hybrid and cyber-physical systems.”

This award is given annually to a young researcher, under the age of 40, to recognize outstanding research contributions in systems and control, as well as the promise of their future contributions to multidisciplinary research, innovation, and impact on theory or real world applications.

“It is quite humbling to receive this recognition,” said Ozay upon receiving the award at the CSS awards ceremony. “I would like to thank my mentors and colleagues in and outside of UM for their support. I am lucky to be part of an amazing controls group at Michigan. And of course the biggest thanks goes to my students, postdocs, and collaborators with whom we have shared many hours of learning, fun, and research.”

Ozay is a leading expert in hybrid systems and system identification. Her research interests include dynamical systems, control, optimization and formal methods with applications in cyber-physical systems, system identification, verification and validation, and autonomy.

She has already made fundamental contributions that have had far reaching impact on control theory as well as related fields, such as computer vision, machine learning, and formal verification.

An early proponent of correct-by-construction control of hybrid systems, Ozay’s research has resulted in these systems being more robust and safer. She has applied her expertise in cyber-physical systems to real-life systems in collaborations with numerous industrial partners, including United Technologies Aerospace Systems, Toyota Research Institute, and Ford Motor Company.

Her 2016 paper, “Finite abstractions with robustness margins for temporal logic-based control synthesis,” was recognized with the IFAC Journal on Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, Prize Paper Award, for the years 2014-2016. As a doctoral student, she received an IEEE Control Systems Society Conference on Decision and Control Best Student Paper Award.

She is currently a member of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), called Control and Learning Enabled Verifiable Robust AI (CLEVR-AI), with Northeastern University (lead institution), Johns Hopkins University and University of California, Berkeley.

Ozay has received an NSF CAREER Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award and Director’s Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and a NASA Early Career Award. At Michigan, she received the College of Engineering 1938E Award and Ted Kennedy Family Team Excellence Award, and the U-M Henry Russel Award.

Ozay was acknowledged at the annual awards ceremony of the IEEE CSS on Friday, December 17, 2021.