IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Best Student Paper Award

To recognize excellence in a conference paper whose primary contributor(s) is a (are) Student Member(s) of the IEEE.

Historical Background:

Established in 1992

Prize:

Certificate laminated on a plaque, and travel expenses to the CDC for one recipient (round trip restricted minimal coach air fare, conference registration, and up to 4 conference-rate hotel nights for a 3-day conference, and up to 5 conference-rate hotel nights for a 4-day conference). The remaining finalists receive Outstanding Student-Paper award certificates and free student conference registrations.

Funding:

Funded by the IEEE Control Systems Society.

Presentation:

At the Awards Ceremony of the CSS.

Basis for Judging:

Originality, clarity and potential impact on practical applications or theoretical foundations of control.

Eligibility:

Primary contributor(s) of a paper, who was a (were) Student(s) at the time of original submission.

Nomination Details:

Nominations must be made by the student's major mentor(advisor) through the awards portal of PaperPlaza (https://css.paperplaza.net/) by the deadline specified on the CDC website, before the CDC deadline for final paper submission. The final version of the paper must be submitted before submitting the nomination. Nominations are limited to one per advisor. The nomination package includes the nomination form that can be found on the CDC website (under student programs); the form needs to be completed and uploaded through the award portal on PaperPlaza.

The Chair of the CDC Best Student-Paper Award committee is appointed by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society (IEEE CSS), based on recommendations from the IEEE CSS President-Elect and the IEEE CSS ExCom.

The winner is announced by the IEEE CSS Vice-President for Conference Activities at the CSS Award Ceremony during the CDC, where each finalist receives a certificate and the winner receives a plaque.

2024

"Output-feedback Synthesis Orbit Geometry: Quotient Manifolds and LQG Direct Policy Optimization"

IEEE Control Systems Letters (Volume: 8), pgs 1577-1582, June 2024

Spencer Kraisler

2023

"A Distributionally Robust Approach to Regret Optimal Control using the Wasserstein Distance"

2023 62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

Feras Al Taha

2022

"How Are Policy Gradient Methods Affected by the Limits of Control?"

2022 61 st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Cancun, Mexico, pp.5992-5997

Ingvar Ziemann

2021

"Time-Robust Control for STL Specification"

2021 60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Austin, TX, USA, 2021, pp. 572-579

Alena Rodionova, Lars Lindemann, Manfred Morari

, and George J. Pappas

George J. Pappas

Website

Biography

George Papas earned his B.S. in 1991 and M.S. in 1992 in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before coming to Berkeley. While a student at Berkeley, he also served as a graduate fellow in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard in 1994. He was the recipient of the Berkeley EECS Eli Jury Award for Excellence in Systems Research in 1999.

Pappas was hired as a professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Computer and Information Sciences, and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He served as the Deputy Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2008 to 2012, when he was named Chair of the ESE Department. He is a member and former director of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab and a member of the Penn Research In Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems Engineering (PRECISE) Center. His research focuses on control theory and in particular, hybrid systems, embedded systems, hierarchical and distributed control systems, with applications to unmanned aerial vehicles, distributed robotics, green buildings, and biomolecular networks.

Pappas won an NSF Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2004 and became an IEEE Fellow in 2009. He has received numerous awards including the IEEE Control Systems George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award in 2009, the IEEE Control Systems Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize in 2010, the American Control Conference O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award in both 2014 and 2016, the Penn George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research in 2015, the ICRA Best Paper Award in 2017, and the Penn Provost's Award for Distinguished PhD Teaching and Mentoring also in 2017. Pappas was named Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) in 2019 "for contributions to hybrid and networked control systems with applications to robotics."

Affiliation(s)

University of Pennsylvania

United States

2020

"On the Differentiability of Projected Trajectories and the Robust Convergence of Non-convex Anti-Windup Gradient Flows"

IEEE Control Systems Letters, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 620-625, July 2020

Adrian Hauswirth, Florian Dörfler

, and Andrew Teel

2019

"What is the Lagrangian for Nonlinear Filtering?"

2019 IEEE 58th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Nice, France, 2019, pp. 1607-1614

Jin-Won Kim, and Prashant G. Mehta

Prashant G. Mehta

Biography

Prashant Mehta received his M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996 and the Ph.d. degree in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2004 (with Prof. Tim Healey). He is now an Associate Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Neuroscience program at UIUC. He was the co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of the startup Rithmio whose gesture recognition technology was acquired by Bosch Sensortec in 2017. Prior to his academic appointment at UIUC in 2005, he worked at United Technologies Research Center (1996-98 and 2002-05) where he invented the symmetry-breaking solution to suppress combustion instabilities. This solution — which helped solve a sixty-year-old open problem — has since become an industry standard and is widely deployed in jet engines and afterburners sold by Pratt & Whitney.

At UIUC, Prashant works with his students on mathematical and computational aspects of dynamics and control theory. His most significant recent contribution is the feedback particle filter algorithm (see recent projects for details on ongoing research in his lab). He is passionate about working with and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. His students have won the best paper awards at IEEE CDC 2007 and 2009 and have been finalists for the best paper awards at ACC 2010 and at IEEE CDC 2012. He teaches dynamics and control classes as well as the graduate course sequence on engineering mathematics (see list of courses taught). For his teaching, he frequently makes the Incomplete list of teachers rated as excellent at UIUC.

He has served as the Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2019-), Systems and Control Letters (2011-14) and the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control (2012-16). He guest-edited the special issue of the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control to commemorate the life, achievements and impact of Rudolph E. Kalman.

Affiliation(s)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

United States

2018

"Selective Recruitment in Hierarchical Complex Dynamical Networks with Linear-Threshold Rate Dynamics"

2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Miami Beach, FL, 2018, pp. 5227-5232

Erfan Nozari, and Jorge Cortés

2017

"Safe Online Navigation of Convex Potentials in Spaces with Convex Obstacles"

2017 IEEE 56th Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Melbourne, VIC, 2017, pp. 2473-2478

Santiago Paternain, and Alejandro Ribeiro

2016

"A Dynamic Collective Choice Model with an Advertiser"

2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Las Vegas, NV, 2016, pp. 6098-6104

Rabih Salhab

2015

"Orthotic Body-Weight Support Through Underactuated Potential Energy Shaping with Contact Constraints"

2015 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Osaka, 2015, pp. 1483-1490

Ge Lv, and Robert D. Gregg

2014

"Team Optimal Control of Coupled Subsystems with Mean-field Sharing"

53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Los Angeles, CA, 2014, pp. 1669-1674

Jalal Arabneydi

2013

"Communication Delay Co-design in ℌ2 Decentralized Control Using Atomic Norm Minimization"

52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, 2013, pp. 6522-6529

Nikolai Matni

2012

"Intrinsic Consensus on SO(3) with Almost-global cConvergence"

2012 IEEE 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Maui, HI, 2012, pp. 2052-2058

Roberto Tron, and Bijan Afsari

2011

"Symmetric Formulation of the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov Lemma and Exact Losslessness Condition"

2011 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference, Orlando, FL, 2011, pp. 5645-5652

Takashi Tanaka, and Cédric Langbort

2010

"Is Witsenhausen's Counterexample a Relevant Toy?"

49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Atlanta, GA, 2010, pp. 585-590

Pulkit Grover, and Anant Sahai

2009

"A Simulation-based Method for Aggregating Markov Chains"

Proceedings of the 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) held jointly with 2009 28th Chinese Control Conference, Shanghai, 2009, pp. 4710-4716

Kun Deng

2008

"A Sparsification Approach to Set Membership Identification of a Class of Affine Hybrid Systems"

2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Cancun, 2008, pp. 123-130

Necmiye Ozay

, and Octavia Camps