This proposal requests funds to support the first National Control Engineering Students Workshop, to be held at University of Maryland, College Park, MD, from Thursday, April 28, through Sunday May 1, 2011. Motivated by the success of the previous six Northeast Control Workshops, which were aimed at students from universities in the Northeast, this workshop is aimed at reaching a broader set of students from universities across the nation. The goal is to enhance the education and professional preparation of graduate students and postdoctoral students by providing them with an opportunity to present their work; to interact with their peers, established researchers in the field, and researchers from industry and government lab. The students will learn about cutting edge research in areas such as energy, biology, hybrid systems, and cyber-physical systems from the invited speakers.
Intellectual Merit: The proposed workshop will provide the students a broad understanding of the current developments in the field of control engineering and make them cognizant of the emerging areas in the field. In additional to the student participants, this workshop will bring together leading researchers in the field of control, some of whom will be invited as plenary speakers and keynote lecturers. As such, the workshop will provide a forum for the much needed interaction between control theory and various inter-disciplinary application areas, resulting in a cross-pollination of ideas and providing an impetus for interdisciplinary collaborations.
Broader Impact: The proposed workshop will encourage a broad and diverse group of students to pursue research careers, by providing them with an opportunity to closely interact with leading researchers in the field in an intimate setting. Moreover, the unique opportunity to interact with industry researchers will be invaluable for these students and postdocs as they transition into independent junior researchers over the next few years.
The National Control Engineering Students Workshop was organized successfully at University of Maryland, College Park from April 28-May 1, 2011. This was attended by over 100 students and faculty members. The workshop was composed of several invited and student presentations. The invited presentations were composed of a tutorial on Hybrid Dynamical Systems: Modeling, Stability, and Control by Prof. Andrew Teel (University of California, Santa Barbara), lectures by Prof. Mathukumalli Vidyasagar (University of Texas at Dallas) on Metric Distances Between Probability Distributions on Different Sets, Prof. Panganamala R. Kumar (Texas A&M) on Challenges in Cyberphysical Systems, by Prof. Miroslav Krstic (University of California, San Diego) on Nonlinear Control in the Presence of Large and Non-Constant Input Delay, Prof. Muther Dahleh (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on Price Volatility in the future Grid: a Control Perspective, Mr. Greg Marshall (National Geographic Society) on Crittercam: Animal-Borne Imaging… A Wild Point of View, Prof. Michael Alley (Pennsylvania State University) on Presenting Your Engineering Research. From the National Science Foundation, an overview of the Electrical, Communications, and Cyber Systems at NSF was provided by Dr. Robert J. Drew, a talk on Cyber-Physical Systems was given by Dr. D. Helen Gill, and on Control Engineering at NSF by Dr. Radhakishan Baheti. The students/postdocs were able to present their research via oral and poster presentations. The talks by students and postdoctoral researchers were on Control of Hybrid and Nonlinear Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Robotic and Sensor Systems, Distributed Systems, Optimization, Stochastic Systems, and Biological Systems. Several additional areas were covered in the poster presentations. The students/postdocs were exposed to the cutting edge research in the leading areas in control theory, and they were able to network with faculty and other student/postdoc researchers. The feedback from the workshop particpants was very appreciative of the workshop, and they also provided several valuable suggestions to improve future versions of this workshop.
