Jing Yu

ECE 210M

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

jing5 [at] uw [dot] edu

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, and an affiliate faculty member with the Clean Energy Institute. Before joining UW, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with R. Srikant and at the University of Michigan with Necmiye Ozay. I received my Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from Caltech in 2024, where I was advised by John Doyle and Adam Wierman. My research has been recognized by the Caltech CMS Amori Doctoral Prize, an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, an ACM e-Energy Best Paper Award Finalist recognition, and an ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention.

Research Themes. My group develops foundations for online and adaptive learning and control for engineering systems in safety-critical, large-scale, and dynamically changing settings. We study how physical constraints inherent to real systems, including stability, robustness, safety, and communication limitations, shape algorithm design. We also work on system-level optimization for networked control architectures, where communication patterns, contextual information, and controller structure are designed together rather than imposed after the fact. These ideas are motivated by, and tested in, applications such as power grids, building HVAC systems, particle accelerators, and other large-scale cyber-physical systems.

Prospective Students. If you are interested in joining our group, please apply to the UW ECE graduate program and mention my name in your application. Current UW students interested in control, learning, and sustainable energy systems are welcome to reach out by email.

News

Sep 01, 2025	Three papers on statistical fundamental limits of system identification, performance-communication tradeoffs in networked systems, and multi-agent control with minimal communication are accepted to CDC 2025.
Jul 08, 2025	Gave an invited talk at the Interplay Between Machine Learning and Set-Based Identification & Control workshop at ACC 2025.
Jun 17, 2025	Served as a PC member and registration chair for ACM e-Energy 2026 in Banff, Canada, co-located with ACM Sustainability Week.
Jun 23, 2024	Funded through NSF to be a long program participant in Architecture of Green Energy Systems at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI) from June 23 - August 23, 2024.
Sep 01, 2023	Gave an invited poster presentation at the Young Researcher Workshop hosted at Cornell University.
May 31, 2023	Gave an invited talk at the Online Optimization Methods for Data-driven Feedback Control workshop at ACC 2023.
Mar 01, 2023	Named an Amazon AI4Science Fellow of the 2023 class.
Jan 01, 2023	Gave a talk at the ControlX meeting hosted by Prof. Mehran Mesbahi at the University of Washington.
Dec 06, 2022	Co-organized a workshop on System Level Synthesis (SLS) at CDC 2022.
Sep 01, 2022	Presented a poster on online control of unknown adversarial systems at the Data-Driven Decision Processes (D3P) program at the Simons Institute.
Aug 01, 2022	Co-organized a workshop on System Level Synthesis (SLS) for CDC 2022.
Jul 01, 2022	Our paper On Infinite-Horizon System Level Synthesis was accepted to CDC 2022.
Jul 01, 2022	Our paper on robust online voltage control was selected as a finalist for the Best Paper Award at ACM e-Energy 2022. Check out the presentation by Chris Yeh.
May 01, 2022	Gave a talk at Prof. Jason Marden’s group at UC Santa Barbara.
Apr 01, 2022	Gave a talk at the 39th Southern California Control Workshop.
Oct 01, 2021	Passed my candidacy exam.

Selected Publications

Online Comfort-Constrained HVAC Control via Feature Transfer

J. Yu, T. Zhang, O. Ardakanian, and A. Wierman

In ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy). 2025

PAPER BIB CODE

@inproceedings{yu2025hvac,
  title = {Online Comfort-Constrained {HVAC} Control via Feature Transfer},
  author = {Yu, J. and Zhang, T. and Ardakanian, O. and Wierman, A.},
  booktitle = {ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy)},
  year = {2025},
}

Learning the Uncertainty Sets for Control Dynamics via Set Membership: A Non-Asymptotic Analysis

Y. Li, J. Yu, L. Conger, and A. Wierman

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 2024

PAPER BIB CODE

@inproceedings{li2024uncertainty,
  title = {Learning the Uncertainty Sets for Control Dynamics via Set Membership: A Non-Asymptotic Analysis},
  author = {Li, Y. and Yu, J. and Conger, L. and Wierman, A.},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2024},
}

Online Adversarial Stabilization of Unknown Networked Systems

J. Yu, D. Ho, and A. Wierman

In ACM SIGMETRICS. 2023

PAPER BIB CODE

@inproceedings{yu2023adversarial,
  title = {Online Adversarial Stabilization of Unknown Networked Systems},
  author = {Yu, J. and Ho, D. and Wierman, A.},
  booktitle = {ACM SIGMETRICS},
  year = {2023},
}

Robust Online Voltage Control with an Unknown Grid Topology

C. Yeh, J. Yu, Y. Shi, and A. Wierman

In ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy). 2022

Awarded PAPER BIB CODE

Best Paper Award Finalist

@inproceedings{yeh2022voltctrl,
  title = {Robust Online Voltage Control with an Unknown Grid Topology},
  author = {Yeh, C. and Yu, J. and Shi, Y. and Wierman, A.},
  booktitle = {ACM International Conference on Future and Sustainable Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy)},
  year = {2022},
}

Localized and Distributed H2 State Feedback Control

J. Yu, Y. Wang, and J. Anderson

In American Control Conference (ACC). 2021

PAPER BIB CODE

@inproceedings{yu2021localized,
  title = {Localized and Distributed {H2} State Feedback Control},
  author = {Yu, J. and Wang, Y. and Anderson, J.},
  booktitle = {American Control Conference (ACC)},
  year = {2021},
}