I attended the 2015 Conference on Decision and Control in Osaka, Japan. This was a special trip for me as it was my first conference attending as an assistant professor. I attended many excellent talks and had several productive discussions. It was also my first time ever visiting Japan! I stayed a couple extra days after the conference to do some sightseeing around Osaka and Kyoto. The photo on the right was taken at Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto. The weather was very pleasant, the food was amazing, and I can’t wait for my next visit to Japan!

At the conference, my co-author Ross Boczar (from Berkeley) presented our paper (also co-authored by Ben Recht) “Exponential convergence bounds using integral quadratic constraints”. This work shows how the classical theory of Integral Quadratic Constraints can be generalized to provide certificates for exponential convergence rather than just input-output stability. This tool was applied with great success in a recent paper by me, Ben Recht, and Andy Packard to prove tight convergence bounds on the convergence of many different iterative algorithms commonly used in large-scale optimization.