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C O N F E R E N C E R E P O R T S C O N F E R E N C E R E P O R T S «

2010 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

The 49th IEEE Conference on De-cision and Control (CDC) was held at the Hilton Atlanta, Geor-

gia, from Wednesday, December 15 through Friday, December 17, 2010, with preconference workshops on Tuesday, December 14th. The CDC was sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) with technical cosponsorship from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (ORMS), the Japanese Society for In-

strument and Control (SICE), and the European Union Control Association (EUCA). The conference also received generous fi nancial support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Honeywell, the Mathworks, United Technologies, and the European Em-bedded Control Institute (EECI). De-spite the record cold weather in Atlanta during the week of the conference, the warm southern hospitality of the hotel and of the city provided an excellent atmosphere for CDC attendees and their families. The ease of access and affordability of Atlanta contributed to a record attendance for a U.S. CDC and a high-quality technical program.

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Registration and Technical ProgramThe 2010 CDC received an impres-sive 2060 regular and invited paper submissions. The CSS Conference Editorial Board (CEB) generated 5879 reviews for these papers, an aver-age of 2.85 reviews per paper. Based on these reviews, 1280 papers were accepted for presentation at the con-ference, leading to an acceptance rate of 62%. There were 312 papers, or 24% of the accepted papers, sched-uled in the interactive sessions held on Thursday, December 16, with the

(From left) Oscar Gonzales, Sam Ge, and Gary Balas. (From left) Andy Teel and Christos Cassandras.

CSS President Roberto Tempo (right) passes the gavel to the incoming president Rick Middleton. Steve Marcus and Francesco Bullo.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2011.940737 Date of publication: 16 May 2011

74 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » JUNE 2011

The Georgia Tech student volunteers with Fumin Zhang and Eyad Abed.

Ed Chong extended an invitation to the 2011 CDC in Orlando. CSS members enjoying the banquet.

CDC General Chair Mark Spong welcomes the participants.

rest of the papers scheduled in oral presentation sessions. The technical program included a total of 23 interac-tive sessions, 44 invited sessions, 118 contributed sessions, and three tuto-rial sessions.

The CDC continued its tradition of having strong international presence. Paper authorship by IEEE regions was 36.9% from Region 1–6 (United States), 3.4% from Region 7 (Canada), 41.4% from Region 8 (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), 4.4% from Region 9 (Latin America), and 13.9% from Region 10 (Asia and Pacific).

Conference advance and onsite registration exceeded 1400, making the 2010 CDC one of the largest U.S. CDCs on record. Both the student travel support and support for devel-oping countries contributed to the suc-cess of the CDC. Nearly 500 students attended the conference, which bodes well for the future of the CSS. Kishan Baheti provided US$10,000 for student travel support from his program at the National Science Foundation, which allowed us to provide registration

and three hotel nights to 26 students. An additional 14 students received identical support from the CSS Stu-dent Travel Support Program. Nine people, three of whom were students, received travel support from the CSS Support for Developing Countries Program. The supported applicants were from Russian, Ukraine, Turkey, South Korea, Serbia, Brazil, and India. In addition, the 2010 CDC continued the practice of giving free workshop registration to students.

PRECONFERENCE WORKSHOP AND EDUCATION WORKSHOPThe preconference workshops were well attended with over 175 regis-trants, including 50 students, in eight full-day workshops. These were

» Adaptive Networks and Bio-Inspired Cognition, organized by Ali H. Sayed (University of California, Los Angeles, United States)

» Correct-by-Design Embedded Control Software Synthesis, organized by Antoine Girard

(Universite Joseph Fourier, France), Giordano Pola (Univer-sity of l’Aquila, Italy), and Paulo Tabuada (University of Califor-nia, Los Angeles, United States)

» Verification of Control Sys-tems, organized by Ufuk Topcu (California Institute of Technol-ogy, United States) and Bruce H. Krogh (Carnegie Mellon Uni-versity, United States)

» Smart Grids: New Challenges for Control Systems Society, or-ganized by Nader Motee (Cali-fornia Institute of Technology, United States), Steven Low (Cal-ifornia Institute of Technology, United States), and Radhakisan S. Baheti (National Science Foundation, United States)

» The Second Workshop on Formal Methods for Aerospace, orga-nized by Manuela L. Bujorianu (University of Manchester, Unit-ed Kingdom), Michael Fisher (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom), and Maria Prandini (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)

After the awards ceremony, Christos Cassandras, Ted Djaferis, Pradeep Misra, Panos Antsaklis, and Kostas Kyriakopoulos.

JUNE 2011 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 75

» Applied Fractional Calculus in Controls and Signal Processing, organized by YangQuan Chen (Utah State University, United States)

» Codesign of Control and Real-Time Computing: Perspectives, Techniques, and Research Di-rections, organized by Vijay Gupta (University of Notre Dame, United States) and Paulo Tabuada (University of Califor-nia, Los Angeles, United States).

In addition to these regular work-shops, two special workshops were organized. These were

» Half-Century’s Excellence in Systems and Control Engineer-ing—A Workshop Dedicated to Brian D.O. Anderson’s 70th Birthday, organized by Arvin Dehghani (Australian Nation-al University, Australia) and Changbin (Brad) Yu (Australian National University, Australia)

» Preconference Workshop for High School Students and Teachers, in Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the CSS and American Automatic Con-trol Council (AACC) Outreach Program, organized by Bozen-na Pasik-Duncan (University of Kansas, United States, and chair of CSS and AACC Technical Committees on Control Educa-tion) and coorganized by Bon-nie Ferri (Georgia Tech, United States) with the financial sup-

port of the CSS, AACC, the Uni-versity of Kansas, and Georgia Tech.

Additional special sessions orga-nized and held during the conference were

» Special Education Session: Pre-paring Tomorrow’s Scientists and Engineers for the Chal-lenges of the 21st Century, orga-nized by Bozenna Pasik-Duncan (University of Kansas and chair of CSS and AACC Technical Committees on Control Educa-tion) and sponsored by the CSS, AACC, and University of Kansas

» Honeywell Session: Optimiza-tion and Control for the Smart Grid: Selected Applications and Challenges, organized by Tariq Samad (Honeywell)

» MathWorks Technical Session: Teaching Control Systems to Future Engineers: How to Le-verage Interactive Educational Tools, organized by Pascal Ga-hinet (Mathworks)

Finally, two other special events rounded out the technical portion of the CDC. These were

» Panel Discussion on E-Print Servers and Traditional Publish-ing, organized by John Baillieul (Boston University) and Roberto Tempo (Politecnico di Torino)

» “Women in Control” Luncheon, the semi-annual meeting of the IEEE CSS Standing Committee on Women in Control.

EXHIBITSEleven exhibitors participated in the 2010 CDC. Honeywell and the Mathworks were gold sponsors, United Technologies Research Cen-ter (UTRC) was a silver sponsor, and Quanser, Pendcon, Taylor & Francis, dSpace, National Instruments, SIAM, Springer, and Wolfram Research were regular exhibitors. To increase traffic through the exhibits area, the confer-ence provided coffee breaks and other refreshments throughout the day as well as a cybercafé sponsored by the EECI in the exhibits area.

PLENARY AND SEMIPLENARY LECTURESWe were honored to have an excel-lent set of plenary and semiplenary lectures by leading members of CSS. These were “Tall Transfer Functions, Singular Spectra, and Econometric Modeling” by Brian Anderson, Aus-tralian National University; “Ran-domization in Systems and Control: a Change of Perspective” by Marco Campi, University of Brescia, Italy; “Why Should I Care About Stochastic Hybrid Systems?,” by Joao Hespanha, University of California at Santa Bar-bara; and “Switched Systems with Positivity Constraints: Theory, Appli-cations and Open Problems” by Elena Valcher, University of Padua, Italy. In addition, the Bode lecture was given by Manfred Morari of the ETH, Zurich, and was titled “The Role of

The CSS banquet.The President’s and General Chair’s Reception was held at the Georgia Aquarium.

76 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » JUNE 2011

Theory in Control Practice.” All ple-nary and semiplenary sessions were well attended and well received. Con-tinuing a tradition begun several years ago, these lectures were recorded and will be available in the CSS archives.

AWARDS CEREMONY AND BANQUETThe annual CSS Awards Ceremony was held on Thursday, December 16, prior to the conference banquet. Over 400 people attended the awards cere-mony and nearly 1200 people attended the banquet. The CSS awards were presented by members of the CSS Executive Committee. The IEEE was represented by the Division X Direc-tor Vicente Piuri, who presented the IEEE-level awards.

CSS AwardsThe 2010 Outstanding Chapter Award went to the Montreal Section CSS Chapter, chaired by Kaveh Moezzi, for recognizing its constant effort in pro-moting high-quality technical meet-ings and for dissemination to a large audience.

The 2010 Distinguished Mem-ber Award was presented to Edwin Chong of Colorado State University for scientific contributions in the area of control, optimization, and model-ing, with applications to computer and communication networks, sen-sor networks, and wireless systems, and outstanding service to the CSS through editorial and conference-related activities.

This year there were four finalists for the CDC Best Student Paper. These were Behrouz Touri, Masahiro Ono, Pulkit Grover, and Sebastien Blandin. The award was presented to Pulkit Grover for the paper, “Is Witsenhau-sen’s Counterexample a Relevant Toy?” coauthored with his advisor Anant Sahai.

The three CSS Outstanding Paper Awards were

» The IEEE Control Systems Mag-azine Outstanding Paper Award to Rafael Goebel, Ricardo G. Sanfelice, and Andrew R. Teel

for their article “Hybrid Dy-namical Systems,” IEEE Control Systems Magazine, April 2009, pp. 28–93.

» The IEEE Transactions on Con-trol Systems Technology Out-standing Paper Award to Cheng-Lun Chen and George T.-C. Chiu for their paper “Banding Artifact Reduction for a Class of Color Electrophotographic Printers With Underactuated Motor/Gear Configuration,” IEEE Transactions on Control Sys-tem Technology, vol. 16, no. 4, July 2008, pp. 577–588.

» The George S. Axelby Outstand-ing Paper Award to Nuno C. Martins and Munther A. Dahleh for their paper “Feedback Con-trol in the Presence of Noisy Channels: ‘Bode-Like’ Funda-mental Limitations of Perfor-mance,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 53, no. 7, July 2008, pp. 1604–1615.

The 2010 Control Systems Tech-nology Award was given to Mrdjan Jankovic of Ford Motor Company for “advancing automotive engine tech-

nology using novel control and opti-mization methods.”

The 2010 Transition to Practice Award was given to Markos Papa-georgiou, and Ioannis Papamichail “for the development and implemen-tation of ramp metering algorithms, in particular at the Monash Freeway, Melbourne, Australia.” The Transi-tion to Practice Award comes with an invitation to deliver a plenary lecture at the 2011 IEEE Multiconference on Systems and Control, one of the two annual CSS conferences.

The 2010 Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize, which recognizes distinguished cutting-edge contri-butions by a young researcher to the theory or application of systems and control, was given to George J. Pap-pas “for fundamental contributions to embedded, hybrid, and networked control systems.”

Finally, the 2010 Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize went to Manfred Morari, head of the Department of Information Technology and Electri-cal Engineering at ETH.

IEEE AwardsThe IEEE-level awards presented at the 2010 CDC were the Control Sys-tems Award and IEEE Fellow awards. The Control Systems Award was pre-sented to Graham C. Goodwin who was recognized “for contributions to the theory and practice of digital and adaptive control.”

The 2010 recipients of the IEEE Fellow award, who were evaluated by the CSS, were Alberto Bemporad, Francesco Bullo, Raffaello D’Andrea,

Ann Rundell.

The 2010 award winners.

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Outstanding Chapter Award presented to (right) Kaveh Moezzi by Shinji Hara.

The Distinguished Member Award present-ed to (right) Edwin Chong by Shinji Hara.

The Student Best Paper Award presented to (left) Pulkit Grover by Elena Valcher.

The IEEE Control Systems Magazine Award presented to Rafael Goebel, Ricardo G. Sanfelice, and Andrew R. Teel by (left) Chris-tos Cassandras.

The IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstand-ing Paper Award presented to Cheng-Lun Chen and George T.-C. Chiu by (left) Christos Cassandras.

The George Axelby Outstanding Paper Award presented to Nuno C. Martins and Munther A. Dahleh by (left) Christos Cassandras.

Control Technology Award presented to (right) Mrdjan Jankovic by Sam Ge.

The Antonio Ruberti Young Investigator Prize presented to (right) George Pappas by Roberto Tempo.

The CSS Bode Prize presented to (right) Manfred Morari by Tariq Samad.

78 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » JUNE 2011

Guoxiang Gu, Ronald Patton, Zhi-hua Qu, Rodolphe Sepulchre, Mark Shayman, Changyun Wen, and Xiaohua Xia. In addition, the follow-ing CSS members were elected IEEE Fellows but evaluated by other Soci-eties as indicated in parentheses: Eitan Altman (Communications), Maria Valla (Indistrial Electron-ics), Umit Ozguner (Inofrmation Thoeory), Hiroyuki Hama (Power & Energy), Stefano Chiaverini (Robot-ics and Automation), and Ian Fergu-son (Sensors).

THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEEI want to especially thank the mem-bers of the 2010 CDC Organizing Committee without whose dedica-tion and hard work the 2010 CDC would not have been possible. Fathi Ghorbel served as program chair and put together the Techni-cal Program Committee. LK Mestha (Publications chair), Warren Dixon (Finance chair), Jorge Cortes (Work-shop chair), Magnus Egerstedt (vice chair for Invited Sessions), Gang-

bing Song (vice chair for Interactive and Tutorial Sessions), Kristi Mor-gansen (Student Activities chair), Fumin Zhang, (Local Arrangements chair), Marcie O’Malley (Publicity chair), Ann Rundell (Registration chair), and Bonnie Ferrie (Exhibits chair) all worked tirelessly to make the CDC a success. I would also like to thank Sandra Hirche and Shinji Hara for their assistance with the travel support programs. Alessan-dro Astolfi, the CEB chair, and the entire CEB deserve special thanks for providing the large number of reviews of the technical papers. And, of course, Pradeep Misra and Paperplaza continue to provide outstanding and tireless support. Finally, I would like to recognize Pam Halverson from Georgia Tech for her help at the registration desk and the many student volunteers who made sure that the sessions ran smoothly. This was truly a great team effort.

Mark W. Spong2010 CDC General Chair

IEEE Control Systems Award presented to (left) Graham Goodwin by Vicente Piuri.

Graham Goodwin delivering remarks upon receiving the Control Systems Award.

Bill Helton has been pillar of sys-tems theory for many years. So it comes as a surprise that he has a

numerical age and, further, given his perpetual enthusiasm, engagement, and good humor, that it increments at the same rate as for the rest of us. (Bill claims to have a proof of this.)

On October 2–4, 2010, a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation was held to celebrate the accomplishments of Bill Helton in his 65th year. The workshop focused on topics that constitute Bill’s research

legacy—H-infinity synthesis theory for linear and nonlinear systems, lin-ear matrix inequalities, operator model theory, noncommutative geometry, noncommutative computer algebra,

and spectral representations of opera-tors. The workshop was hosted by the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics and the Department of Math-ematics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), with generous help provided by Bill’s wife, Ruth Williams of the Mathematics Department at UCSD.

Bill was born in November 1944 in Jacksonville, Texas. His father was an oral surgeon in the U.S. Army and later in private practice. His mother was a drama major at Northwestern University and worked in her hus-band’s oral surgery practice. Bill fin-ished high school at Alamo Heights, Texas, at the age of 16. He received his

Control, Optimization, and Functional Analysis: Synergies and Perspectives

A WORKSHOP IN HONOR OF J. WILLIAM HELTON

Bill Helton.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2011.940738

Date of publication: 16 May 2011