Inspiring reports & exciting projects - your IFAC update from December 2024
In this issue:
Distinguished Lecturer Program Report from Activities in South Africa
The IFAC Distinguished Lecture program (chaired by Hideaki Ishii) has taken off during this first post-pandemic triennium. In this issue, readers can learn about recent lectures given in South Africa by Na Li.
Na (Lina) Li - “Representation-based Control and Learning for Dynamical Systems”
October 2024, Pretoria & Stellenbosch, ZA
In October 2024, Na (Lina) Li from Harvard University (US) visited South Africa as an IFAC Distinguished Lecturer. The visit included two talks and participation in an inspiring outreach program. The trip was hosted by Derik le Roux at the University of Pretoria (UP) and Tobi Louw at Stellenbosch University (SU), supported by the South African Council for Automation and Control (SACAC) and the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS).
Li’s lecture focused on advancing data-driven methodologies for controlling complex dynamical systems. Both talks at the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University drew a diverse audience of faculty, students, and industry professionals.
The lecture addressed key challenges in applying machine learning to dynamical systems, particularly regarding sample efficiency, computational feasibility, and safety. Li introduced a novel framework representing stochastic nonlinear dynamics linearly in a nonlinear feature space, enabling efficient control and reinforcement learning methods. Real-world examples illustrated these methods, tackling challenges such as the sim-to-real gap.
"Lina was impressed by the thoughtful questions and the depth of engagement from the audience."
As part of the trip, Li participated in the Girls in Control workshop at the Cape Town Science Center, organized by Syamala Krishnannair from the University of Zululand. This one-day program brought together 30 girls aged 9-13 from three Cape Town schools to inspire interest in science, technology, and engineering.
The workshop featured hands-on activities, including a robotics session and Scratch coding tutorials, encouraging students to explore problem-solving and creativity. The girls also attended a science show hosted by the science center.
"Witnessing the excitement and engagement of the participants was deeply rewarding and reaffirmed the importance of nurturing young talent in engineering and science." - Na Li
Who’s Who in IFAC: Distinguished Lecturer Program Lecturers
Alexandre Dolgui
Research Focus: Manufacturing line design, production planning, scheduling, and supply chain engineering.
Dolgui is an IISE Fellow and has contributed significantly to the theory of assembly line balancing, combinatorial design of machining lines, process planning, and supply chain scheduling.
Alexandre Dolgui received several degrees from well known institutes and universities:
He was an Assistant then Associate Professor at the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (former Minsk Radioengineering Institute) from 1986 to 1997, an invited researcher at Inria in France (1992 – 1995), Associate and Full Professor at the University of Technology of Troyes (1995 - 2003), Full Professor and a Research Center Director at the Mines St Etienne (2003 – 2015), he has received the Chinese Academy of Sciences Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists (2013) and since October 2015, he is a Distinguished Professor (Exceptional Class) and the Head of the Departement Automation, Production and Computers Sciences (116 persons) at IMT Atlantique, campus in Nantes, France.
He is an IISE Fellow. His research focuses on manufacturing line design, production planning, scheduling, and supply chain engineering. His main results are based on exact mathematical programming methods and their intelligent coupling with heuristics, metaheuristics and automatic control techniques. He has contributed to the theory of assembly line balancing, combinatorial design of machining lines, process planning, supply chain scheduling, lot sizing, and replenishment planning under uncertainties as well as to the theory of resilience and risk analysis in supply networks.
He is the co-author of 5 books, the co-editor of 32 books or conference proceedings, the author of over 330 refereed papers in international journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Production Research, an Area Editor of Computers & Industrial Engineering, former Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics and Omega, Member of the Editorial Board of 24 other journals including the International Journal of Production Economics.
He is an Active Fellow of the European Academy for Industrial Management, Member of the Board of the International Foundation for Production Research, former Chair (Vice-Chair now) of IFAC's CC5 Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Enterprises - TC 5.2 Manufacturing Modelling for Management and Control, Member of IFIP WG 5.7 Advances in Production Management Systems, IEEE System Council Analytics and Risk Technical Committee, he has been Scientific Chair of many leading scientific conferences as IFAC INCOM 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2015, and IFAC MIM 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022, and received several international, as well as in Belarus, China, United States and France, awards for his research. He was also awarded as Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering by Clarivate in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
👉🏼 Further information is available at: imt-atlantique.fr/en/person/alexandre-dolgui
Lecture Topics:
Mihoko Niitsuma
Research Focus: Autonomous social robotics for human-robot interaction and collaboration.
Mihoko Niitsuma received her Ph. D. from the University of Tokyo in 2007. Since 2009, she has been with the Department of Precision Mechanics at Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, where she is currently a full professor.
Niitsuma has been a member of IFAC's CC4 Mechatronics, Robotics, and Components - TC 4.3 on Robot Control, IFAC, since 2018. She served as the IPC chair of the 1st IFAC Workshop on Robot Control 2019. She also served as an IEEEIES AdCom member (2018-2021, 2021-2024), an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on II (2017-), a Member of the IEEE Medal for Environmental & Safety Technologies Committee (2015-2018), a vice-chair of IEEE-IES Technical Committee on Control, Robotics, and Mechatronics (2020-2023), and chair of the TC (2024-).
Research interests: Her research interests include autonomous social robotics for human-robot interaction and collaboration. She applies this approach to robot-assisted parent-child interaction therapy and virtual-animal-assisted activity Lecture topics: - Etho-robotics for human-autonomous social robot interaction and its application - Building environmental maps describing human walking activity using a 3D LiDAR for autonomous mobile robots
Lecture Topics:
Eduardo D. Sontag
Eduardo D. Sontag received his Licenciado in Mathematics at the University of Buenos Aires (1972) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics (1977) under Rudolf E. Kalman at the University of Florida. From 1977 to 2017, he was at Rutgers University, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and a Member of the Graduate Faculty of the Departments of Computer Science of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Cancer Institute of NJ. He directed the undergraduate Biomathematics Interdisciplinary Major and the Center for Quantitative Biology, and was Graduate Director at the Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine. In January 2018, Sontag became a University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of BioEngineering at Northeastern University, where he is also affiliated with the Mathematics and the Chemical Engineering departments. Since 2006, he has been a Research Affiliate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, and since 2018 he has been a Faculty Member in the Program in Therapeutic Science at Harvard Medical School.
His major current research interests lie in several areas of control and dynamical systems theory, systems molecular biology, cancer and immunology, machine learning, and computational biology. Sontag has authored over five hundred research papers and monographs and book chapters in the above areas with about 60,000 citations and an h-index of 106 (54 since 2019).
He is a Fellow of various professional societies: IEEE, AMS, SIAM, and IFAC, and is also a member of SMB and BMES. He was awarded serveral prizes and awards:
Awards:
IFAC Activity Fund: Awarded Projects from April 2024 Call
The IFAC Activity Fund provides funding for control engineers and scientists for initiatives that maximize control community engagement, promote inclusion and diversity in alignment with the IFAC guidelines, and increase control engineering influence in public discourse and decision-making. 👉🏼 https://sites.ifac-control.org/activityfund
Calls for proposals are distributed each April and October. We have now completed the review, selection, and contractual process from the April 2024 call, and we are pleased to announce that the following exciting projects are under way!
Control Conference Africa:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Activities at the 2024 IFAC CPHS Conference
Controlled Fun – a Control-themed Advent calendar
Workshop on Creating Awareness of Control in Higher Secondary School Students
Cybathlon 2024 South African Hub
Wonders of Control Engineering via Drone Flying and Electric Vehicles
Graduate School on Advanced Sliding Mode Control
2D Animated Cartoons for Control Education Rise
👉🏼 Find the latest post on this topic here:
The October 2024 call for proposals drew another large pool of strong applications. We look forward to announcing the results in early 2025. For further information on the Activity Fund, including reports on completed projects, visit sites.ifac-control.org/activityfund.
The American Control Conference
was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 8-12 July 2024 at the Westin Harbour Castle. The purpose of this annual conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the control community to share their ideas and findings. Engagement of students and young professionals was a priority for the conference, including a student networking session, several special sessions, and the self-driving car student competition by Quanser.
The operating committee was also assisted by the Student Advisory Committee in organizing the conference. In total there were 1363 registrants at the conference, including 415 students. There were 46 countries represented at the conference.
Technical Program: 1391 papers were submitted to the conference, with 863 accepted for the conference proceedings and associated oral presentations. Papers were presented in two formats: rapid interactive sessions in the morning and traditional presentations in the afternoon. In addition, the program also included 34 invited sessions, two tutorial sessions, 20 special sessions, and 43 Late-Breaking News posters. Four plenary sessions started each day: by Kingsley Fregene (Lockhead Martin), Domitilla Del Vecchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jorge Poveda (University of California- San Diego), and Francesco Borelli (University of California- Berkeley), and video recordings are available: ieeecss.org/presentations
Workshops: Twelve workshops were held on July 8-9 prior to the main conference on July 10-12. All workshops were fully in person and included both half-day and full-day workshops.
Awards: Four individual awards were presented at the Awards Ceremony, plus two Hugo Schuck Best Paper Awards and the Student Best Paper Award. Naomi Leonard of Princeton University delivered remarks as the Bellman Heritage Award Winner.
Social Events: The conference featured many opportunities to network and to reconnect with old friends, with plenty of good food and drink. The Thursday evening banquet at the Royal Ontario Museum was a highlight of the week.
Acknowledgements: The organizers and operating committee appreciate the contributions of our sponsors and exhibitors, the student advisory committee, the student volunteers, and all of the conference participants for an engaging and enjoyable conference experience. Next Conference in the Series: The 2025 American Control Conference will be held in Denver Colorado from 7-10 July: https://acc2025.a2c2.org/
The 4th IFAC Workshop on Internet based Control Education (IBCE 2024)
took place in Ghent, Belgium from 18- 20 September 2024.
The single-track event hosted 29 papers from 14 countries, two plenary talks and keynote talks given by experts from both the academia and the industry. The workshop featured keynote speakers from the clinical field who shared the needs and challenges they encounter in practice from the perspective of control engineering and education. Additionally, speakers from the pharmaceutical industry and textile manufacturing were present, discussing the current problems and challenges in their sectors and how control engineering and education can contribute to addressing these issues.
The event provided new insight and research directions for TC 9.4 to address control education in a teaching and professional setting where interconnection (the Internet being a paradigmatic but certainly not the only example) plays a role of steadily increasing importance.
The 8th IFAC Workshop on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Methods for Nonlinear Control (LHMNC 2024)
took place in Besançon, France, from June 10 to June 12, 2024. After Princeton/USA (2000), Seville/Spain (2003), Nagoya/Japan (2006), Bertinoro/Italy (2012), Lyon/France (2015), Valparaíso/Chile (2018), and Berlin/Germany (2021) we were happy to hold this eighth workshop of the series in the historical capital of Bourgogne Franche comté.
LHMNC 2024 brought together control experts from different areas to exchange ideas on physical structures as the foundation of versatile design methods, discuss new approaches for modeling, analysis, and control design, and present state-of-the-art results on applications to complex dynamical engineering systems.
The roots and motivation of the LHMNC lie in the fact that advances in technology and progress in digitalization and automation require accounting for diverse nonlinear phenomena in the design of increasingly complex control systems that are connected via digital communication networks and process increasing amounts of acquired data (such as for digital twins or Industry 4.0). Vital challenges to be tackled by the control community include modeling, operation, and control of smart and sustainable systems of energy generation, storage, and distribution. Very efficient and robust approaches for modeling, numerical approximation, order reduction, simulation, and control design are based on Lagrangian and Hamiltonian system formulations.
For example, the port-Hamiltonian framework has made significant progresses in methodology and applications to cope with heterogeneous networks of different types, coupled multi-physical and thermodynamic systems. Such energy-based formulations allow combining the powerful design methods of passivity-based control with the specific properties of the differentialgeometric structures of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian systems. Recent developments have shown the power of the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian framework for distributed parameter systems, in combination with adapted numerical schemes, with many examples in fluid dynamics, acoustics, fluid-structure interaction, quantum mechanics, and irreversible thermodynamics, but also in the field of system identification and machine learning.
Application areas of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian methods in nonlinear control include, among others,
The LHMNC 2024 received contributions from 18 countries across 4 continents, and its final program consisted of two parallel sessions with a total of 63 presentations: 57 corresponded to regular or invited papers, 2 to discussion papers, and 4 to plenary presentations. Six invited sessions were organized, gathering 32 papers on the topics of
The LHMNC 2024 largely succeeded in providing a rich environment for the exchange of novel and disruptive ideas, the friendly and stimulating socialization of students, practitioners, and academics, and the creation and consolidation of research collaborations.
The 3rd Control Conference Africa (CCA 2024)
took place from 16 - 17 September 2024 in Balaclava, Mauritus, at the spectacular Ravenala Attitude Hotel. Over and above the magnificent location, the event brought together control researchers and practitioners with the aim of promoting the exchange of ideas and developments in control engineering in Africa.
The event included five high-quality plenary sessions from various focus areas within process control, with the control of complex dynamic systems (including water and energy distribution) being one emergent theme, as presented by Marija Ilic (MIT- US), Edo Abraham (TU Delft- NL), and Lars Grüne (University of Bayreuth-DE), across their three respective plenary sessions.
One plenary session by Martin Guay (Queen's University, CA) focused on extremum seeking control, and another, presented by Gideon Botes (Sasol), focused on the effective implementation of data science technologies in the chemical industry.
There was also a special session about "Female Historical Influencers in Automatic Control", presented by Charlotta Johnsson and Eva Westin from Lund University (SE), which was well-received and used a springboard to launch future initiatives within the wider D&I theme.
👉🏼 Have a look at the latest post regarding this topic here:
Two workshops were hosted after completion of the main conference.
In summary, the conference was well received by attendees, and provided a great mix of control themes presented by researchers, practitioners, and plenary speakers. The social functions also provided the stimulating atmosphere to exchange ideas and make new acquaintances. We hope that this conference has contributed to its goal of furthering control research in Africa.
The 17th IFAC Symposium on Control of Transportation Systems (CTS 2024)
took place from 1-3 July 2024, in Ayia Napa Cyprus. It consisted of 2 plenary speakers and 2 parallel sessions which took place July 1 and 2. The third day (July 3) was devoted to networking and a bus day tour.
The word symposium is a Greek word and has its origin in Ancient Greece. It means social gathering where people can socialize and talk about specific topics while drinking and eating as in Plato’s Symposium. Due to its size of about 55-60 participants had the true flavour of a symposium as it gave the opportunity to the participants to get to know each other, networking and eating together while presenting and discussing a variety of topics that included:
The plenary talk by Andreas A. Malikopoulos was about a mobility equity metric for socially optimal emerging mobility systems dealing with mobility and accessibility and equity and how to quantify these attributes. The plenary talk by Jack Haddad was about the control of advanced air mobility systems which involved the control of low altitude passenger and delivery aircraft into the urban airspace. The participants were together for lunch in a nice setting outside the conference rooms which gave the chance to people to continue discussions and network.
On the evening of July 2 the symposium has its banquet in a nice outdoors setting with plenty of local food, music and entertainment. During the banquet the Young Author Awards were presented as follows:
On July 3 the participants were offered a bus tour to the archaeological site of Kourion with its magnificent Greco-Roman ancient theatre overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the birthplace of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love in ancient Greece, which also included a visit to the ancient mosaics of Pafos which are considered among the finest in the world and serve as a stunning record of Greco-Roman daily life. Given the size of the participants they all fit in one bus which enhanced networking and further discussions.
While CTS 2024 did not attract a large crowd of participants due to several conferences in the region which offered sessions on transportation topics its smaller size offered unique opportunities to participants that cannot be found in large conferences and a taste of a true symposium where everyone got to know each other with longer presentation times and adequate time for discussions. The Organizing Committee would like to thank all the authors and participants for their excellent presentations, lively discussions and active involvement. Many thanks also go the IFAC PoL Editor in Chief José-Luis Díez who allowed a one-time exception for publishing papers that exceed 6 pages due to a 2022 change in policy that limits the number to 6 or less pages. Pradeep Misra was very helpful concerning Papercept issues. More details can be found in ifaccts2024.wixsite.com/ifac-cts2024
Reminder: IFAC Fellows and Major Awards 2023-2026
The calls for both the IFAC Fellows and Major were published in the October 2024 issue of this Newsletter and are also available on the IFAC website: ifac-control.org/newsletter_archive/IFAC_Newsletter_2024_5_October.pdf (please see pages 1- 3)
The calls as well as the links to forms in the IFAC Cloud and Papercept are available here: ifac-control.org/awards/award-nominations-2024
IFAC Major Awards Nominations
IFAC NMOs and IFAC Technical Committee Chairs as well as other individuals are invited to nominate a candidate (candidates) for one or more of the IFAC Major Awards:
Nominations should be submitted through PaperCept until February 15, 2025.
IFAC Fellows Nominations IFAC is seeking nominations for 2023-2026 IFAC Fellows.
The IFAC Fellow award provides a distinction of excellence in the Federation and is conferred on a small number of outstanding scientists or engineers by the IFAC Council, based on the proposal of the Fellow Selection Committee. With the appointment as an IFAC Fellow, IFAC honors outstanding contributions with a high impact in the fields of interest of IFAC in the role as a Scientist, Engineer, Technical Leader or Educator. These contributions may be technical publications, patents, control solutions, products, software, and leadership in research, development and education. Any IFAC affiliate being a control scientist or engineer can be nominated for the title of an IFAC Fellow, with the exception of current members of the IFAC Council, Fellow Search Committee and Fellow Selection Committee. Past involvement in IFAC activities, publications and events is desirable and an asset but not absolutely mandatory. For a list of IFAC Fellows elected so far, please go to the IFAC website at: ifac-control.org/awards/ifac-fellows
IFAC Fellow candidates must be proposed by a separate Nominator and receive from 3 to 5 reference forms from Referees.
👉🏼 Important deadlines:
IFAC Major Awards Nominations: 15 February 2025
References: 15 March 2025
IFAC Fellows Nominations: 1 February 2025
References: 1 March 2025
IFAC Affiliates Statistics
As of 26 November 2024, the IFAC database contains 8.087 affiliates. 43% of these (3510) have registered in the new IFAC Portal and thereby provide useful data about IFAC volunteers around the globe:
The TCs attracting the largest number of people are: TC2.3 (1236), TC2.1 (1212), TC2.4 (1175), TC1.1 (1055), TC2.2 (1051). The next TCs in the range from 700 to 1000 affiliates are TC2.5 (964), TC1.2 (892), TC4.3 (861), TC7.5 (746). Follows a group of TCs with approximately 600 affiliates: TC4.1 (648), TC9.4 (633), TC1.5 (612), TC7.1 (588), TC6.3 (549). The next TCS scale quite uniformly around 350 to 500 affiliates: TC7.3 (505), TC3.2 (492), TC5.2 (473), TC5.4 (468), TC1.3 (463), TC3.1 (449), TC1.4 (426), TC7.4 (421), TC5.1 (396), TC4.2 (392), TC2.6 (385), TC6.1 (380), TC6.4 (356), TC8.2 (349). The remaining ones are TC8.3 (301), TC8.1 (283), TC9.2 (278), TC7.2 (264), TC9.3 (252), TC8.4 (217), TC9.1 (215), TC3.3 (203), TC6.2 (161)
Make sure to have a look at the newsletter on the website: 👉🏼 https://www.ifac-control.org/newsletter_archive/IFAC_Newsletter_2024_6_December.pdf