Henk van Waarde

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Affiliation
Systems, Control and Optimization group
Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and AI
University of Groningen


Contact details
Nijenborgh 9
9747 AG Groningen
The Netherlands
h.j.van.waarde(at)rug(dot)nl


Links
[LinkedIn]
[Google Scholar]


I am an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, where I work in the Systems, Control and Optimization group within the Bernoulli Institute.
I am also a member of the Centre for Data Science and Systems Complexity and the Jan C. Willems Center for Systems and Control.
For my bio and a summary of my CV, see this page.
Also feel free to browse through my publications, presentations and updates linked below.

News

July 2025: Check out my new book on data-driven control, co-authored with Kanat Camlibel and Harry Trentelman!
June 2025: I gave a lecture at the DISC summer school on experiment design for data-driven modeling and control.
April 2025: I co-lectured a 5-day course at IIT Mandi, India. All handouts are online!
December 2024: We organized a workshop on data-driven control during the CDC in Milan. Slides are available here!
March 2024: I gave a mini-course on data-driven control at the 2024 Benelux meeting on Systems and Control. Slides are available here!

Research

My research interests lie in the field of systems and control. I aim to develop a systems and control theory that is grounded on measured data. I work towards mapping raw data into models and control policies with rigorous guarantees on accuracy, stability and performance, while answering key questions such as: how much data is needed? how to handle noise? and how to perform control-relevant experiments?

Some of the specific topics of interest are:

  • Direct data-driven control

  • System identification

  • Kernel-based modeling of (physical) dynamical systems

  • Experiment design

  • Applications to networked systems and neuromorphic computing

I am approaching the question of how much data is required for control via the concept of data informativity, see my new book and the overview paper:

To address robustness of controllers with respect to noise and bounded nonlinearities, I have worked on generalizations of the S-lemma and Finsler's lemma:

Kernel-based modeling for systems with (incremental) dissipativity properties is treated in the papers:

Some other recent work involves the problem of experiment design:

A complete list of my publications and preprints can be found here or on my Google Scholar page