- 3010 South Engineering Research Center
- Phone (205) 348-4979
- Faculty Website
Dr. Ali Pakniyat
Assistant Professor
Contact
- 3010 South Engineering Research Center
- phone (205) 348-4979
- Faculty Website
Education
- B.S., Mechanical Engineering, Shiraz University.
- M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology.
- Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, McGill University.
- Postdoc, Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan.
- Postdoc, Robotics, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Ali Pakniyat is an Assistant Professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alabama. He received the B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Shiraz University, the M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University. After holding a Lecturer position at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of McGill University, and two postdoctoral positions in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech, he joined the University of Alabama in 2021 where he is now an Assistant Professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering.
His research interests include deterministic and stochastic optimal control, nonlinear and hybrid systems, multi-agent systems and mean field games, with applications in automotive industry, robotics and mathematical biology.
Affiliated Areas
Mechanical Engineering
Selected Publications
- A. Pakniyat, “A Graphon Mean Field Convex Duality Approach to Shaping the Terminal Probability Distribution of a Network of Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems”, (accepted for publication in) Journal of Systems Science and Complexity, 2025.
- K. P. Hawkins, A. Pakniyat, E. Theodorou, and P. Tsiotras, “Solving Feynman-Kac Forward Backward SDEs Using McKean-Markov Branched Sampling”, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 69, no. 9, pp. 5695-5710, 2024.
- A. Pakniyat, and P. E. Caines, “The Minimum Principle of Hybrid Optimal Control Theory”, Mathematics of Control, Signals, and Systems, pp. 1–50, 2023.
- A. Pakniyat, “A Convex Duality Approach for Assigning Probability Distributions to the State of Nonlinear Stochastic Systems”, IEEE Control Systems Letters, vol. 6, pp. 3080 – 3085, 2022.
- D. Firoozi, A. Pakniyat, and P. E. Caines, “A Class of Hybrid LQG Mean Field Games with State-Invariant Switching and Stopping Strategies”, Automatica, vol. 141, pp. 110 244, pp. 1–14, 2022.
Awards and Honors
- Graduate Excellence Award in Engineering
- Canadian Marconi Graduate Award
- MEDA (McGill Engineering Doctoral Award)
- GERAD (Groupe d’Études et de Recherche en Analyse des Décisions) Doctoral Fellowship