Pablo Parrilo

About

Pablo Parrilo is the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering at MIT. His research areas include Artificial Intelligence + Machine Learning, Information Science and Systems, Optimization and Game Theory, and Systems Theory, Control, and Autonomy. He is involved in developing techniques for the analysis and synthesis of systems that interact with the external world through perception, communication, and action, while also learning, making decisions, and adapting to changing environments. His work leverages computational, theoretical, and experimental tools to address challenges in sensing, processing, energy transduction, and physical substrates for computation.

Research topics

• Mathematics
• Combinatorics
• Computer science
• Mathematical optimization
• Applied mathematics

Selected publications

• Shortest Paths in Graphs of Convex Sets

  SIAM Journal on Optimization · 2024-02-01 · 56 citations

  articleOpen access

  Given a graph, the shortest-path problem requires finding a sequence of edges with minimum cumulative length that connects a source vertex to a target vertex. We consider a variant of this classical problem in which the position of each vertex in the graph is a continuous decision variable constrained in a convex set, and the length of an edge is a convex function of the position of its endpoints. Problems of this form arise naturally in many areas, from motion planning of autonomous vehicles to…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Control

  2021-01-01 · 43 citations

  article
  Publisher

• Towards Tight Convex Relaxations for Contact-Rich Manipulation

  2024-07-15 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  We present a novel method for global motion planning of robotic systems that interact with the environment through contacts.Our method directly handles the hybrid nature of such tasks using tools from convex optimization.We formulate the motion-planning problem as a shortest-path problem in a graph of convex sets, where a path in the graph corresponds to a contact sequence and a convex set models the quasi-static dynamics within a fixed contact mode.For each contact mode, we use semidefinite pro…

  PublisherDOI

• Lifting for Simplicity: Concise Descriptions of Convex Sets

  SIAM Review · 2022-11-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper presents a selected tour through the theory and applications of lifts of convex sets. A lift of a convex set is a higher-dimensional convex set that projects onto the original set. Many convex sets have lifts that are dramatically simpler to describe than the original set. Finding such simple lifts has significant algorithmic implications, particularly for optimization problems. We consider both the classical case of polyhedral lifts, described by linear inequalities, as well as that…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acceleration by stepsize hedging: Silver Stepsize Schedule for smooth convex optimization

  Mathematical Programming · 2024-11-25 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract We provide a concise, self-contained proof that the Silver Stepsize Schedule proposed in our companion paper directly applies to smooth (non-strongly) convex optimization. Specifically, we show that with these stepsizes, gradient descent computes an $$\varepsilon $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>ε</mml:mi> </mml:math> -minimizer in $$O(\varepsilon ^{-\log _{\rho } 2}) = O(\varepsilon ^{-0.7864})$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathM…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Novel Game-Theoretic Tools and Solution Concepts with Applications to Network Dynamics and Control

  NSF · $390k · 2010–2015

• AF: Large: Collaborative Research: Algebraic Proof Systems, Convexity, and Algorithms

  NSF · $2.1M · 2016–2022

• Optimization and Control of Stochastic Wireless

  NSF · $240k · 2006–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Rekha R. Thomas

  86 shared

• João Gouveia

  83 shared

• James Saunderson

  76 shared

• Hamza Fawzi

  72 shared

• Alan S. Willsky

  63 shared

• Asuman Ozdaglar

  54 shared

• Amir Ali Ahmadi

  39 shared

• Venkat Chandrasekaran

  California Institute of Technology

  35 shared

Labs

• MIT EECS Communication LabPI

Education

• PhD, Control and Dynamical Systems

  California Institute of Technology

Awards & honors

• 2025-26 EECS Faculty Award Roundup

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Manolis Kellish-164
• Antonio Torralbah-133
• Daniela Rush-129