About Us

Driven by societal challenges, the goal of the Zardini Lab at MIT is to develop efficient computational tools and algorithmic approaches to formulate and solve complex, interconnected system design and autonomous decision-making problems. Applications feature society-critical problems in mobility, logistics, autonomy, automotive, aerospace, energy, and complex systems in general. The lab, comprised of researchers equipped with strong mathematical skills and diverse engineering backrounds, solves such problems by employing and enhancing techniques from optimization, control theory, game theory, domain theory, and applied category theory.

Check out our latest publications here!

Upcoming talks by Prof. Zardini:

• 01/27/26 - Invited Seminar at Nanyang Technological University Singapore
• 02/19/26 - Invited Seminar at Cornell University
• Spring 2026 - Invited Seminar at Princeton University
• Spring 2026 - Invited Seminar at Harvard University

News

01/22/2026 - Our IEEE L-CSS paper on Optimism as Risk-Seeking in MARL has been accepted for presentation at ACC 2026!
01/19/2026 - Gioele gave a seminar at Institute of Science, Tokyo!
01/16/2026 - Gioele gave a seminar at Keio University!
01/07/2026 - Gioele gave a seminar at Osaka Metropolitan University!
01/05/2026 - Two workshops accepted at ACC 2026!
01/02/2026 - Our paper on Accelerating High-Capacity Ridepooling in Robo-Taxi Systems has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
12/16/2025 - Gioele gave a seminar at Seoul National University!
12/02/2025 - Our work on safe soft robotics control is on MIT news! Have a look here!
11/30/2025 - Our paper on Optimism as Risk-Seeking in MARL has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters!
11/10/2025 - Our IEEE T-RO paper on Co-Design of Embodied Intelligence has been accepted for presentation at AAAI-26 in Singapore!
11/08/2025 - Marc Neumann, co-advised by Gioele, has successfully defended his Ph.D. Thesis on Strategic Formula 1 Optimization at ETH Zurich!
10/29/2025 - Vincent's TMLR paper has been accepted for presentation at ICLR 2026! Rio here we come 2.0!
10/24/2025 - Gioele gave a talk at Northeastern University.
10/22/2025 - Our work on Compositionality for DL Architectures, led by Vincent and published in TMLR, has been awarded a J2C Certification (top 10%). Also, Vincent gave an invited seminar on the subject at GPU Mode. Find it here!
10/12/2025 - Jiarui and Maximilian have presented their work, and Runyu gave a Rising Star spotlight talk at NERC'25!
10/10/2025 - Gioele gave an IDS.900 Doctoral Seminar.
10/02/2025 - Gioele gave a talk at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in NYC!
10/02/2025 - We are the MIT News Homepage Spotlight today, with the article Accounting for uncertainty to help engineers design complex systems
09/25/2025 - Our work on contact-aware safety for soft robotics has been accepted to the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
09/24/2025 - Gioele gave a talk at the MIT–Amazon Science Hub Robotics Research Day 2025!

For the entire list of news, please refer to news!