Plenary talks
MMAR 2025 plenary lecturers
| Sophie Tarbouriech LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France |
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| Enrique Zuazua Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany |
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| Mirek Sopek MakoLab S.A., Poland |
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Sophie Tarbouriech received the Ph.D. degree in Control Theory in 1991 and the HDR degree (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) in 1998 from University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. Currently, she is a Senior Researcher at CNRS and a member of LAAS- CNRS, Toulouse. Her main research interests include analysis and control of linear and nonlinear systems with constraints (limited information), and hybrid dynamical systems. She is currently Associate Editor for SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization and Senior Editor for Automatica. She is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Automatica. She is a member of IFAC and IEEE Technical Committees on Nonlinear Systems and Hybrid Systems. She is an IFAC Pawel J. Nowacki Distinguished Lecturer and is IEEE Fellow for contributions to nonlinear control systems with isolated nonlinear elements. |
Enrique Zuazua
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Enrique Zuazua (Eibar, Basque Country–Spain, https://dcn.nat.fau.eu/enrique-zuazua/) holds, since September 2019, the Chair for Dynamics, Control, Machine Learning and Numerics – Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, at the Department of Mathematics of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany and part-time appointments at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and the Fundación Deusto, Bilbao, Spain. He is also a member of the Basque Academy “Jakiunde“, Fellow of the Artificial Intelligence Industry Academy (AIIA), of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), and of the Academia of Europaea, and scientific advisor of the artificial intelligence company Sherpa AI in Bilbao.
He holds a degree in Mathematics (1984) from the University of the Basque Country, and a dual Ph.D. degree from the same university (1987) and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (1988). In 1990 he became Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, to later move to UAM in 2001. His fields of expertise in the broad area of Applied Mathematics include Partial Differential Equations, Systems Control and Numerical Analysis and Machine Learning. He has been awarded the Euskadi (Basque Country) Prize for Science and Technology 2006 and the National Julio Rey Pastor Prize 2007 in Mathematics and Information and Communication Technology and the Advanced Grants of the European Research Council (ERC) NUMERIWAVES in 2010, DYCON in 2016 and CoDeFeL in 2022. In 2022 he was awarded the W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize of SIAM. He was invited section speaker in “Control and Optimization” in ICM2006, Madrid. With over 300 articles published, his work had an important impact (h-index = 50). He has supervised 30 PhD students and a broad network of master students, post-doctoral researchers and research and management technicians. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journals “Mathematical Control and Related Fields” and “Advances in Continuous and Discrete Models” and member of the editorial committee of other Journals and of scientific committees of various centers and agencies. He was the first Manager for Mathematics of the Spanish National Research Plan in 1999-2002, the Founding Scientific Director of the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) in 2008-2012 and of the Chair of Computational Mathematics at the University of Deusto-Bilbao in 2016, both in Bilbao. Since 2021 he is the inaugural Speaker of the FAU Research Center for Mathematics of Data (MoD). He also develops an intense dissemination agenda, gathered at https://cmc.deusto.eus/enzuazua/. |
Mirek Sopek
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Dr. Mirek Sopek is the founder of MakoLab S.A., a software company publicly listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, with offices in Poland, France, Germany, the UK, and the United States. He also serves as the CEO of MakoLab USA, Inc.
He graduated from the Faculty of Technical Physics, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics at the Lodz University of Technology, and later obtained his doctoral degree from the same university’s Faculty of Chemistry, specializing in theoretical and quantum chemistry. Over the years, he has held teaching positions at the Lodz University of Technology (molecular modelling), the University of Humanities and Economics (e-commerce/cryptography), and the National Film School in Lodz (computer graphics). Since 2008, Dr. Sopek has worked extensively with semantic technologies (symbolic AI). In this capacity, he contributed significantly to the automotive and financial extensions for schema.org, a web-scale vocabulary supported by major search engines. Under his leadership, MakoLab has focused on enhancing the use of digital identifiers, particularly the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), by advancing LEI Knowledge Graphs. The company’s spin-off platform, lei.info, integrates blockchain and semantic technologies to improve data connectivity and transparency. In the broader context of data management and financial infrastructure, Dr. Sopek has also served as a member of the European Commission Expert Group on the European Financial Data Space. In 2021, he founded Quantum Blockchains, Inc. (https://www.quantumblockchains.io/), initially to develop a functioning quantum-resistant blockchain; the company’s activities have since broadened to accelerate the adoption of quantum cryptography in cybersecurity. That same year, he became Chairman of the University Council at the Lodz University of Technology. |