Multi-robot systems are physically embodied networks — they sense, move, and communicate through the physical world. The bar for safe decision-making rises as these systems enter safety-critical, real-world settings where they must perform well under uncertainty. Our work shows that physicality is a resource against the two kinds of uncertainty they face: intentional (or adversarial), where data is manipulated by malicious agents, and natural, where aspects of the environment are simply unknown. Most of this talk concerns intentional uncertainty. Here, one way to exploit physicality is by using communication as a sensor. Because the signals robots exchange are difficult to forge, they carry evidence that can be cross-validated to yield a quantifiable likelihood that an agent's data is trustworthy. This is the foundation of cy-trust, in which stochastic observations of trust model an agent's trustworthiness probabilistically from physical rather than cryptographic evidence. Each neighbor's contribution is then weighted by its trust value. Under this framework, we show that consensus, distributed optimization, and other core coordination tasks admit almost-sure convergence with bounded deviation from their nominal performance, even when malicious agents exceed half of a node's connectivity, past the classical Byzantine bound. We support this finding with both theory and hardware experiments under adversarial attack. Against natural uncertainty, we show that real-time sensing can be folded into rollout-based reinforcement learning, where the same machinery reweights futures rather than neighbors. We apply this idea to routing a fleet of robots to stochastically appearing demand and, with Project CETI, to the first autonomous robotic rendezvous with sperm whales at sea. Finally, we preview some of our future work combining trust with long-horizon sequential decision-making, targeting planning that stays provably resilient when the data informing the plan may itself be corrupted.
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\r\nStephanie Gil is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and an Associate Faculty member of the Kempner Institute. Her research focuses on trust and coordination in multi-robot systems, at the intersection of robotics, communication, and learning. Her contributions have been recognized through the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2024), the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2021), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2019). She was named a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow for her work at the intersection of robotics and communication. She earned her Ph.D. at CSAIL at MIT, specializing in multi-robot coordination and control, and her B.S. at Cornell University.
We are pleased to invite you to the first Cogito Lunch event, a new series building on the tradition of LUNCHenPHILO / L’heure H, those philosophical interludes that have been part of some of our lunch breaks since 2021.
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\r\nOrganized by the Vice-Presidency for Education (VPE), these sessions aim to foster dialogue between experts from various disciplines and the campus community, particularly students. We hope, therefore, to explore ideas and questions that stimulate our imagination, challenge our sensibilities, and shed light on our fears and expectations. The discussions will be moderated by journalist Anne Laure Gannac.
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\r\nFor the session on Thursday, November 5, we’ll tackle a question that is as fascinating as it is mind-boggling: “When does consciousness begin?” Neuroscience, machine learning, and the humanities will come together to try to answer it.
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\r\nThe discussion is open with:\r\n
The Doctoral School is glad to invite all first-year PhD candidates to join the annual PhD Welcome Event!
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\r\nWhat to expect:
\r\n- Meet the EPFL doctoral community, the administrators of the doctoral school and programs, the PhD associations
\r\n- Discover the many EPFL services dedicated to supporting and counseling students and researchers
\r\n- Get useful insights about your doctoral journey at EPFL, and the resources available to help you
\r\n- Enjoy free food & drinks, and connect with PhD candidates from all our programs and campuses!
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\r\nWho is it for?
\r\n- The event is open to EPFL PhD candidates who enrolled after November 2025. Registration is required.
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\r\nPhD candidates working outside Lausanne are especially encouraged to join. This event is a golden opportunity to discover the Lausanne campus and meet your peers! You may request travel support: please contact us via the registration form.
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\r\nDirect link to the registration form
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\r\nWe look forward to meeting you on November 5th!
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\r\nThe Doctoral School Administration Team (EDOC)
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Thesis Director: Prof. V. Subramanian,
\r\nMaterials Science and Engineering doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11463
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker
Thesis Director: Prof. D. Constam,
\r\nMolecular Life Sciences doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11220
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker