Gioele Zardini (Engineering Trade-offs and Co-design)

In this episode I got to speak with the fantastic Gioele Zardini about his work on the co-design framework, a fascinating framework used to optimise large interconnected systems. We cover the theoretical background of this, intuition behind it, and a ton of different applications where it’s useful, as well as discussing exciting open questions in the field!

Find the transcript at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XPZr9jP4Lphskkw-SiM8h-x1kp7LROqZ243S6zA7EsY/edit?usp=sharing

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References

Gioele Zardini: https://zardini.mit.edu/

PhD thesis: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/entities/publication/d7c08dd5-bf96-4c1f-a744-5e751f0f44a5

PhDs in control interview: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10555200

Emilio Frazzoli: https://idsc.ethz.ch/research-frazzoli/people/person-detail.frazzoli.html

Andrea Cenci: https://nccr-automation.ch/about/people/andrea-censi

Marco Pavone: https://profiles.stanford.edu/marco-pavone

NuTonomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuTonomy(current site: https://motional.com/)

Brad Nelson: https://msrl.ethz.ch/the-lab/team/Brad_Nelson.html

David Sacramuza: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/people_scaramuzza.html

Yujun Huang: https://zardini.mit.edu/people/yujun-huang/

Uncertainty in co-design paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02766

Background refs on category theory:

David Spivak: https://dspivak.net/
Brendan Fong: http://brendanfong.com/

Gioele's work in progress book: https://storage.zuper.ai/sync/ACT4E/ACT4E/alphubel-prod/build/last/build-public/ACT4E-public.pdf

YouTube talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmAz6fEPa2o

Gioele's course: https://zardini.mit.edu/act4ed/

MIT applied category theory course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s097-applied-category-theory-january-iap-2019/

Seven sketches in compositionality: http://brendanfong.com/fong_spivak_an_invitation.pdf

LQG control co-design paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9654960

LQG background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4_hFazBGxU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_RDCFOlJx4

Aaron Ames: http://ames.caltech.edu/

Nikolai Matni: https://nikolaimatni.github.io/

John Doyle: https://www.eas.caltech.edu/people/doyle
CDC episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ZUcm3gVHKILDEyDjQtXvx

Braess’s paradox: https://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/departments/d1/teaching/ws12/ct/Braess-paradox.pdf

Co-design of mobility-on-demand systems: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.04739

Formula One co-design papers: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/entities/publication/bd65f78e-f19a-4469-a379-d4b219893a33https://CoffeeControlLinks.short.gy/JQmudB

Co-design of soft robotics: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03761  

Cosimo Della Santina inControl episode: https://CoffeeControlLinks.short.gy/LPNORz

Games with partially-ordered objectives: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.07099

Mingjia He: https://mingjia-he.github.io/

Paper on hierarchical games: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12059

Game theory episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2xrwua7U2HfSW3sxY6BnRU

Jeff Shamma inControl episode: https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/1632769/episodes/18482182-ep40-jeff-shamma-gain-scheduling-nonlinear-control-learning-dissipativity-in-games-jiu-jitsu

Vincent Abbott: https://zardini.mit.edu/people/vincent-abbott/

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/sangiovanni-vicentelli.html

InControl episodes:  https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/1632769/episodes/14692449-ep21-alberto-sangiovanni-vincentelli-part-i-classics-eda-logic-synthesis-spice-intel-x386-cadence-synopsis-platform-based-design

https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/1632769/episodes/14882529-ep22-alberto-sangiovanni-vincentelli-part-ii-cyberphysical-and-hybrid-systems-contracts-chiplets-models-of-computation-time-innovative-ecosystems-biobricks-neuromorphics

John Doyle: https://www.eas.caltech.edu/people/doyle