Rate My Professor Shankar Deka

Shankar Deka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation at Aalto University, where he leads the Nonlinear Systems and Control research group. He is affiliated with the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI). Deka received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign between June 2016 and July 2019. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley from August 2019 to July 2022 and at KTH Royal Institute of Technology from August 2022 to October 2023 before joining Aalto University in fall 2023. His academic career developed from an early interest in robotics during his undergraduate studies, including a project with a robotics professor and a five-month R&D internship at an automotive company, followed by graduate research on medical robots.

Deka's research synergistically combines nonlinear stability theory, optimal control, and machine learning to create certifiably safe and robust robotic and learning-enabled systems. Key application areas include telerobotic surgery, precision agriculture, and human-multirobot systems. The Nonlinear Systems and Control group under his leadership focuses on the intersection of control theory and machine learning, developing systems with provable guarantees on safety and performance for medical and rehabilitation robotics, precision agriculture, and multi-agent systems with human-in-the-loop. He is the principal investigator of the project 'INFORM: Intelligent Forest Fire Management via Multi-Resolution Risk Maps,' funded until 2029. Deka's publications include 'Supervised Learning of Lyapunov Functions Using Laplace Averages of Approximate Koopman Eigenfunctions' (IEEE Control Systems Letters, 2023), 'Path-Integral Formula for Computing Koopman Eigenfunctions' (62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2023), 'Koopman-based Neural Lyapunov functions for general attractors' (61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2022), 'Towards Cyber–Physical Systems Robust to Communication Delays: A Differential Game Approach' (IEEE Control Systems Letters, 2022), and 'Convexifying State-Constrained Optimal Control Problem' (IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2023). He serves as an editor for Unmanned Systems (World Scientific) and guest editor for Mathematics.