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St Hugh’s Fellow elected to the Professorship of Control Engineering at Cambridge University

Professor Alessandro Abate, St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science and Professor of Verification and Control in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, has recently been elected to the Professorship of Control Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Professor Abate’s statutory chair in the Engineering Department at Cambridge, will provide senior leadership to the Control Engineering group, and will establish a new research initiative, connecting core control aspects with areas of Computer Sciences (formal methods, automata theory, logic), towards applications in modern agentic AI.

At the Oxford Department of Computer Science, Professor Abate leads OXCAV – the Oxford Control and Verification research group – and earlier he served as Deputy Head of Department. At Oxford he also co-directs the Ellison Institute of Technology CDT in Fundamentals of AI.

Professor Abate’s research focuses on control theory, formal verification and AI, and is underpinned by interests spanning decision theory, logic and probability. The overall goal of his work is to provide formal guarantees to ever more complex AI agents, particularly in the context of safety-critical, sequential decision-making problems.

Professor Abate said, ‘These are exciting times to work on AI Safety, and this Chair in Control represents a great platform for advancing science and for impactful real-world engineering applications of modern agentic AI. It is however with a heavy heart that I shall leave Oxford – the Computer Science Department has been a dream place to work at, and St Hugh’s College has openly bolstered my work on AI broadly construed. It will not be easy to leave so many keen collaborators, world-class scholars, and very good friends at college.’

St Hugh’s Senior Tutor, Professor Robert Vilain said, ‘On behalf of St Hugh’s, I would like to offer our heart-felt congratulation to Professor Abate and to thank him for his invaluable contribution to the College in his role as Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science. He has also been quite pro-active to establish and expand an emphasis on AI here at college, supported by generous donations and helped by younger colleagues. His work on AI safety is important and timely, given the rise of AI and issues surrounding it, and we wish him well as he continues to contribute to the development of safety in AI.’

St Hugh’s College members will be pleased to know that Alessandro will be with us until the beginning of 2027.

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