This proposal requests support for student travel to the 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), which will be held in Maui, Hawaii, December 10-13, 2012. The IEEE CDC is the annual flagship conference of the IEEE Control Systems Society and one of the premier international conferences in the field of systems and control, featuring both theory and applications. The funds will provide partial support for up to twenty students from US colleges and universities to attend the conference and present their research results.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT: Systems and control theory is ubiquitous in modern, complex, technological systems, from automotive to aerospace systems, biomedical systems, industrial automation systems, robotics, and a host of other systems. It is increasingly evident that current research on many technological frontiers is heavily influenced by foundational ideas from control and system theory. The recent 50th IEEE CDC received over 2300 submissions and accepted 1354 for presentation, many of which are co-authored by students together with their faculty advisers. The intellectual merit of the proposed use of funds is that graduate students will see first-hand how the foundations of control and systems are evolving and shaping the frontiers of research in many applications domains.
BROADER IMPACT: With over 1080 anticipated research presentations, including plenary lectures, workshops and exhibits the CDC provides attendees with exposure to the state-of-the-art in emerging areas of control research and technology. The broader impact of this travel support is that it will help train the next generation of system and control researchers and practitioners. The future security and well-being of the United States relies on maintaining pools of trained scientists and engineers in critical areas such as control technology. The students to be supported under the proposed project represent the future technological leaders of the IEEE Control Systems Society, which is the world's leading professional organization in the discipline.
The 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) was held December 10–13, 2012. The IEEE CDC is the annual meeting of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) while the ECC is organized every two years under the auspices of the European Union Control Association (EUCA). These conferences are conducted in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), and the Japanese Society for Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE). The 51st IEEE CDC received 2363 submitted papers, plus 9 tutorial papers. A total of 1262 papers were accepted and organized into 204 technical sessions. The conference acceptance rate was 53.4%. The 51st IEEE CDC had 1479 registrants, including 528 student registrations. Of these students, fourty-ninewere supported to attend the conference. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) provided $15000 which partially supported twenty-seven US students. The IEEE Control System Society (CSS) provided $10000 which partially supported twenty-two students. We are grateful to Dr. Kishan Baheti, Program Director at NSF, for his continued support for students to participate in our conference. Selection Committee: The selection committee consisted of Shuzhi Sam Ge (Chair of Member Activities of IEEE CSS), Sandra Hirche (Chair of Student Activities Committee of IEEE CSS and CDC 2012 Student Activities Chair), Hong Chen (CDC 2012 Student Activities Co-Chair), Jagannathan Sarangapani (CDC 2012 Registration Chair), with Jay A Farrell (IEEE CDC 2012 General Chair) as an ex-officio member. Selection Process: The deadline for application for student travel support was set to August 15, 2012. Beforehand the eligibility conditions as well as the application requirements were published on the conference website: http://control.disp.uniroma2.it/cdc2012/stud_support.php. Overall, 98 applications were submitted by the deadline. We received 7 more requests after deadline, which were not considered. Of the 98 applications received on time: 8 of the 98 applications were incomplete and excluded from the selection process; due to the high number of applications compared to available funding we excluded all applications from students who have received an award in CDC or MSC in the past two years, amounting to an additional 15 applicants being excluded; and, one more applicant knew that he would not receive the visa in time and removed himself from consideration. As a result there were 74 eligible applications to be considered further. The strategy for selection was to provide the maximum number of students with a reasonable level of support. Student travel support funding was available from NSF and CSS. Therefore, we tried to optimally distribute the students between the two sources. Of the 74 eligible applications, 49 were eligible for NSF Student travel support Selection criteria: Applicants were prioritized according to the following criteria: Preference to applicants who have not benefited from this support in the last two years, Demonstration of active participation in CSS, Preference to applicants who will present more than one paper at the Conference. Specifically, the selection has been made according to the following objectives and rules: maximize number of students that receive funding maximize number of presented papers if more than 2 students from the same lab applied, then only one could be awarded. The last rule applied for 10 applications, leaving 64 applications for further consideration. Among those 64 a ranking has been made giving the highest scores to the applicants with a large number of papers (max has been 4), and ranking the remainder according to their relative authorship, i.e. favoring those with first authorship and low number of coauthors. According to this ranking we selected 22 students for the CSS student travel award and 27 for the NSF student travel award. The 22 CSS awardees received paid student registration (22 times the student registration of $250). In addition, CSS provided 15 of the awardees with 3 nights in the conference hotel (4 of the students declined support for accommodation, 3 students were awarded in a second batch from remaining/rejected funding and could be provided only student registration). The 27 NSF awardees each received paid student registration ($250) and 3 paid nights in a shared room at the conference hotel ($321.54), for an overall total expense of $15431.58 (=27*571.54). The NSF was invoiced for $15000 and the conference funded the $431.58 difference. Of the 64 qualifying students, 13 students could not be funded. Decision notifications were sent out to the students on September 1, 2012. The room sharing and matching has been organized by the CDC2012 Student Activities Co-Chair Hong Chen. The number of applications increased in 14% compared to 2011 (2011: 86 applications). In 2012, 20 applications out of the 98 are female and 10 out of the 49 awarded students (NSF+CSS) are female.
