Melkior Ornik

Assistant Professor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

ROLES AT IMM

2023
IMM International Faculty
Dynamical System
Course
Pakistan
Spring

ABOUT ME

What are your current areas of research and what excites you most about these areas?

I am an applied mathematician at heart, primarily working in the broad area of control theory. In short, I am interested in controlled dynamical systems operating in limited-information scenarios, such as uncertain dynamics, remote environments, or at dimensional scales that make information analysis infeasible. The mathematical tools that we often use are optimization, differential geometry, graph theory, and probability theory. Relevant to my current position in an engineering department, the problems that I tackle are often motivated by applications to high-level autonomy across domains, such as infrastructure systems, autonomous vehicles, and deceptive agents.

CURRICULUM

from 2019 to Present
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
USA
from 2019 to Present
IMM International Faculty, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
USA
from 2014 to 2017
PhD Graduate, University of Toronto, Canada
Canada
from 2011 to 2013
MSc Graduate, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Canada
from 2007 to 2011
University of Zagreb
Croatia

MORE INFORMATION

What inspired you to teach for IMM? How have you found your experience at IMM?

I just love teaching and generally talking to people about math, anywhere and anytime. On a more philosophical level, I find that it is extremely easy to stay in one's own academic or institutional "bubble" and to eventually begin believing that there is nothing else outside -- that the students and collaborators that we have access to are all ones that are valuable anyway. Of course, that is wrong. We need to reach outside the bubble, not just for the sake of belief in basic equity, but for the sake of sustainable success of our educational and research enterprises. At IMM I found an incredible pool of motivation, knowledge, and skill, an amazing desire to continually absorb new ideas, and a group of students that I would love to see at my own university and in my collaboration circles. If my involvement contributes to fulfilling their goals, I am honored to help, and I believe that their inclusion in a broad, international family is of immense benefit across the entire mathematical community.

What is your teaching philosophy? What would you like to transmit to your students? How do you motivate them?

Teaching is like leaving for a long journey, and a journey that is much longer than the one from Germany to Pakistan. It is a journey in time: you have to recall how things used to look like when you were a student, when the implicit function theorem was this complicated statement with all that assumptions you had to remember, and not this familiar instrument that you use in your daily life more often than your cell phone. When you reach this destination, you are ready to focus on the few basic notions that you wish to transmit to your students: you try to formulate them in different ways and illustrate them by many examples, including the one that made you understand things when you were a student, but also many more, because each mind works in its own way.
PEOPLE ARCHIVE

IMM Algeria

Algeria
96

IMM Pakistan

Pakistan
50
IMM PAKISTAN

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