Feras Al Taha
PhD Candidate at
Cornell ECE
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I am a PhD candidate in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, advised by Eilyan Bitar and Francesca Parise. I am broadly interested in robust and stochastic control, learning in games, and energy systems. My current research develops principled methods for decision-making under uncertainty, with applications to electric vehicle flexibility, network games, and distributionally robust control.

If you are interested in collaboration or would like to chat, feel free to reach out at foa6 (at) cornell (dot) edu.

Education

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Ph.D. + M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. January 2021 – Present.
Advisors: Eilyan Bitar and Francesca Parise

McGill University, Montreal, QC. B.Eng. (Honours) in Electrical Engineering. September 2016 – May 2020.

Experience

Tesla Motors Inc., Palo Alto, CA. Embedded Software Validation Intern. May 2020 – November 2020.
L3 MAPPS Inc., Montreal, QC. Electrical Engineering Intern. May 2019 – November 2019.

Honors & Awards

Honorable Mention Poster Award. Los Alamos National Laboratory Grid Science Winter School and Conference. 2025.
IEEE CDC Best Student Paper Award. IEEE Control and Systems Society. 2023.
NSERC Postgraduate Doctoral Scholarship (PGS-D). 2022–2025.
British Association Medal. McGill University — High scholastic standing among graduating class. 2020.
Dean's Honours List. McGill University — Top 10% of Engineering faculty by CGPA. 2016–2020.
Canadian Officers Training Corps Memorial Scholarship. McGill University — Merit-based entrance scholarship. 2016–2020.
Marianopolis Scholar & Ernest Fox Award for Excellence in Mathematics. Marianopolis College. 2016.

Publications

Journals:

  1. F. Al Taha and E. Bitar. "Distributionally Robust Risk Sensitive Estimation via Conditional Value-at-Risk." To appear in IEEE Control Systems Letters. 2026.
  2. F. Al Taha, T. Vincent, and E. Bitar. "An Efficient Method for Quantifying the Aggregate Flexibility of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Populations." in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 3142–3154, 2024.
  3. F. A. Taha, K. Rokade, and F. Parise. "Learning in Time-Varying Monotone Network Games with Dynamic Populations." arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.06253. 2024.
  4. P. Vyas, F. Al Taha, J. R. Blum, A. Weill-Duflos, and J. R. Cooperstock. "Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Toes: Can Toes Match Fingers for Haptic Discrimination?" in IEEE Transactions on Haptics. vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 130–136, 2020.
  5. J. R. Blum, P. E. Fortin, F. Al Taha, et al. "Getting Your Hands Dirty Outside the Lab: A Practical Primer for Conducting Wearable Vibrotactile Haptics Research." in IEEE Transactions on Haptics. vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 232–246, 2019.

Conferences:

  1. F. Al Taha and E. Bitar. "Distributionally Robust Regret Optimal Control under Moment-Based Ambiguity Sets." in 8th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference. 2026.
  2. F. Al Taha and E. Bitar. "When Are Lossy Energy Storage Optimization Models Convex?" in 2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM). 2025.
  3. F. Al Taha and F. Parise. "Estimation of Unknown Payoff Parameters in Large Network Games." in 2023 American Control Conference (ACC). pp. 2326–2331, 2023.
  4. F. Al Taha, K. Rokade, and F. Parise. "Gradient Dynamics in Linear Quadratic Network Games with Time-Varying Connectivity and Population Fluctuation." in 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). pp. 1991–1996, 2023.
  5. F. Al Taha, T. Vincent, and E. Bitar. "A Multi-Battery Model for the Aggregate Flexibility of Heterogeneous Electric Vehicles." in 2023 American Control Conference (ACC). pp. 1243–1250, 2023.
  6. F. Al Taha, S. Yan, and E. Bitar. "A Distributionally Robust Approach to Regret Optimal Control Using the Wasserstein Distance." in 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). pp. 2768–2775, 2023.
    Recipient of the IEEE CDC Best Student Paper Award.
  7. P. Vyas, F. Al Taha, J. R. Blum, and J. R. Cooperstock. "Haptoes: Vibrotactile Numeric Information Delivery via Tactile Toe Display." in 2020 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS). pp. 61–67, 2020.
  8. A. Weill-Duflos, P. E. Fortin, F. Al Taha, and J. R. Cooperstock. "Haptic Augmentation of Audio and Its Effects on Speech Perception." in International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design. 2020.
  9. G. Negash, C. M. Liang, F. Al Taha, N. B. Khzam, and G. Mussbacher. "Non-Deterministic Use Case Map Traversal Algorithm for Scenario Simulation and Debugging." in 2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW). pp. 54–63, 2019.
  10. A. Weill-Duflos, F. Al Taha, P. E. Fortin, and J. R. Cooperstock. "Barrywhaptics: Towards Countering Social Biases Using Real-Time Haptic Enhancement of Voice." in 2019 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC). pp. 365–370, 2019.

Teaching

Cornell University. Teaching Assistant, ECE 5555: Stochastic Systems: Estimation and Control. Spring 2022.
McGill University. Teaching Assistant, ECSE 403: Control. Fall 2019.
McGill University. Teaching Assistant, ECSE 211: Design Principles and Methods. Winter 2018 – Fall 2019.
McGill University. Teaching Assistant, MATH 263: Ordinary Differential Equations for Engineers. Summer 2017 – Winter 2019.

Service

Reviewer: Conference on Decision and Control (2023–2024), American Control Conference (2024), IEEE Control Systems Letters (2024), IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2024), IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (2025).
Student Volunteer: Maintaining and promoting the Foundations of Information, Networks, and Decision Systems (FIND) seminar website (2022–2026).