IEEE TCNS Steering Committee

John Baillieul

IEEE Control Systems Society

United States

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John Baillieul

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Biography

John Baillieul's research deals with robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and mathematical system theory. His PhD dissertation, completed at Harvard University under the direction of R.W. Brockett in 1975, was an early work dealing with connections between optimal control theory and what came to be called “sub-Riemannian geometry.” After publishing a number of papers developing geometric methods for nonlinear optimal control problems, he turned his attention to problems in the control of nonlinear systems modeled by homogeneous polynomial differential equations. Such systems describe, for example, the controlled dynamics of a rigid body. His main controllability theorem applied the concept of finiteness embodied in the Hilbert basis theorem to develop a controllability condition that could be verified by checking the rank of an explicit finite dimensional operator. Baillieul’s current research is aimed at understanding decision making and novel ways to communicate in mixed teams of humans and intelligent automata. He was awarded the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000, and he has held many positions in the Control Systems Society including that of fortieth President. John Baillieul has also held a number of leadership positions in both the Technical Activities Board and the Publication Services and Products Board of the IEEE. He is past IEEE Vice President of Publication Services and Products. John Baillieul is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of SIAM.

Affiliation(s)

IEEE Control Systems Society

United States

Christos G. Cassandras

Boston University

United States

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Christos G. Cassandras

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Biography

Christos G. Cassandras is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University, Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-founder of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering. He received degrees from Yale University, Stanford University, and Harvard University. In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. and in 1984-1996 he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 350 refereed papers in these areas, and five books. He has collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents. Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (1998-2009) and the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), IFAC’s 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize, 2011 and 2014 prizes for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition, the 2014 Engineering Distinguished Scholar Award at Boston University, several honorary professorships, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC.

Affiliation(s)

Boston University

United States

Frank J. Doyle, III

Harvard University

United States

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P.R. Kumar

Texas A&M University

United States

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Thomas Parisini

Imperial College London, UK

United Kingdom

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Thomas Parisini

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Biography

Thomas Parisini received the "Laurea" degree (Cum Laude and printing honours) in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genoa in 1988 and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 1993. He was with Politecnico di Milano and since 2001 he is professor and Danieli Endowed Chair of Automation Engineering with University of Trieste. Since 2009, Thomas Parisini is Deputy Rector of University of Trieste and since 2010 he holds the Chair of Industrial Control at the Imperial College London.

He authored or co-authored more than 200 research papers in archival journals, book chapters, and international conference proceedings. His research interests include neural-network approximations for optimal control problems, fault diagnosis for nonlinear and distributed systems and nonlinear model predictive control systems. Among several awards, he is a co-recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Paper Award of the IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks and a recipient of the 2007 IEEE Distinguished Member Award. He is involved as Project Leader in several projects funded by the European Union, by the Italian Ministry for Research, and he is currently leading consultancy projects with some major process control companies (ABB, Danieli, Duferco, Electrolux, among others).

Thomas Parisini currently serves as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2021-2022). Past positions include Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Chair of the Conference Editorial Board, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society. Moreover, he was an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society and of the European Union Control Association (EUCA) as well as a member of the board of evaluators of the 7th Framework ICT Research Program of the European Union. Thomas Parisini is currently serving as an Associate Editor of Int. J. of Control and has served on several editorial boards of international journals including the IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, Automatica, and the IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks. He was involved in the committees of several international conferences. In particular, he was the Program Chair of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and General Co-Chair of the 2013 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Thomas Parisini is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Affiliation(s)

Imperial College London, UK

United Kingdom

Ioannis (Yannis) Paschalidis

Boston University

United States

1 (Northeastern U.S.)

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Ioannis (Yannis) Paschalidis

1 (Northeastern U.S.)

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Biography

Yannis Paschalidis is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University (BU) with appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University. He is the Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering -- BU's federation and convergence accelerator of all University centers and initiatives in this area of research. He obtained a Diploma (1991) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an M.S. (1993) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has been at Boston University since 1996. His current research interests lie in the fields of optimization, control, stochastic systems, robust learning, computational medicine, and computational biology. He has published a monograph and more than 250 refereed papers in these topics, and he has been the primary advisor to 29 Ph.D. theses.

Prof. Paschalidis' work has been recognized with a CAREER award (2000) from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the second prize in the 1997 George E. Nicholson

paper competition by INFORMS, the best student paper award at the 9th Intl. Symposium of Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2011) won by one of his Ph.D. students for a joint paper, an IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge Award, and a finalist best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). His work on protein docking has been recognized for best performance in modeling selected protein-protein complexes against 64 other predictor groups (2009 Protein Interaction Evaluation Meeting). His recent work on health informatics won an IEEE Computer Society Crowd Sourcing Prize and a best paper award by the International Medical Informatics Associations (IMIA). He was an invited participant at the 2002 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium organized by the National Academy of Engineering, and at the 2014 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAFKI) Conference. Prof. Paschalidis is a Fellow of both IEEE and IFAC and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems from 2013 until 2019. He is currently the Vice President of Publication Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

Affiliation(s)

Boston University

United States

Jeff S. Shamma

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

United States

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ORCID iD

Jing Sun

University of Michigan

United States

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Pravin Varaiya

University of California at Berkeley

United States

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TCNS Steering Committee Member