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A symposium to honor Professor Antsaklis organized by his graduate students.

Sponsored by The Department of Electrical Engineering and The College of Engineering of the University of Notre Dame.
 
Excerpt from: P. Antsaklis, “Editorial Control Systems and the Quest for Autonomy,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 1013–1016, Mar. 2017.
 

“…On a personal note, the above ideas influenced and guided my research for decades, where I pursued research in learning via neural networks, in DES supervisory control via Petri nets, in the control of hybrid dynamical systems, in networked control systems, and more recently in Cyber-Physical Systems.
I am convinced that there are tremendous opportunities for Systems and Control specialists in the area of Autonomous Systems. Of course this is a long held belief of mine as witnessed by my intensive research in the area, and by my earlier attempts to draw your attention to these opportunities. In fact, the closing comments of my first Editorial as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL in January 2010 [item 1) in the Appendix] were:

Throughout my professional career I have been a firm believer first in the Quest for Autonomy as a powerful driving force in engineered systems over the centuries, and in Feedback as the best mechanism to achieve autonomy, witnessed by feedback’s ubiquitous presence in all natural and human made systems. I have been including these themes in my talks for many years. In our chosen field of Systems and Control we should go beyond emphasizing exclusively only certain types of models and mathematical techniques. We need to see the bigger picture, to realize that there are many ways to describe the phenomena we want to control, involving for example logic in addition to differential equations, as in hybrid systems, and expanding our horizons and our field. And this will happen if in our theoretical research we are also motivated by application needs and not only by mathematical challenges. We have very much to offer, and we should work towards realizing this potential.

And in my 2013 Editorial [item 2) in the Appendix] I wrote:

We need to address bigger problems. A system typically is more than a set of ODEs and the specs may not be conveniently described in the frequency domain. While these specs served us well in the past and are still very useful, we need to move on because the problems and their descriptions have become much more sophisticated and much more demanding. We are in the systems area after all, an area that prides itself for considering a wider view of the problem, taking a system’s, a bird’s eye point of view. In hybrid dynamical systems we combine discrete and continuous dynamics to study the system behavior. Nowadays we have data and lots of it that need to be considered together with our mathematical models. What is the best way to go? This is quite a challenge.

We, in Systems and Control, can be the most important contributors to autonomous systems with our knowledge of feedback (feedback is important throughout, at all levels of autonomous systems; remember that feedback transcends models), our mathematical expertise, and with our fundamental understanding of dynamical systems and their interactions. Let’s do it! Yes, we can!

1) P. J. Antsaklis, “Continuing the tradition of excellence in 2010 and beyond,” IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, vol. 55, no. 9, pp. 1–3, Jan. 2010. [pdf]

2) P. J. Antsaklis, “Continuing the tradition of excellence: Where we have been and where we could go,” IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, vol. 58, no. 9, pp. 2157–2159, Sep. 2013. Part of this editorial was published under the title, “Some thoughts about publishing results in our field,” IEEE Control Syst. Mag., pp. 22–41, vol. 33, no. 6, Dec. 2013.  [pdf]

 

Program

Abstract of talks and copies of presentations 

Book of abstracts is now available for download!

Schedule of Presentations

DayTimeNameTitle
Saturday October 27
1:00Welcome and Introductions
1:30Kimon Valavanis
University of Denver
On Using Entropy as a Unified Measure to Evaluate
Autonomous Functionality of Hierarchical Systems
[PDF of presentation]
1:45Janos Sztipanovits
Vanderbilt University
Is Science in System Integration?
[PDF of presentation]
2:00Jay Farell
University of California at Riverside
Reliably Accurate State Estimation for Connected and Autonomous Highway Vehicles
[PDF of presentation]
2:15Michael Lemmon
University of Notre Dame
Equation-free Supervision of Coherent Structures in Complex Dynamical Networks
2:30Nitesh Chawla
University of Notre Dame
Modeling Higher Order Dependencies in Complex Systems
2:45John Baras
University of Maryland
Trusted Autonomy
[PDF of presentation]
3:00Break
3:30Trevor Williams
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Formation Flying Dynamics and Control for the MMS Mission: Flight Experience
[PDF of presentation]
3:45Eloy Garcia
Air Force Research Laboratory
Cooperative teams and differential games
4:00Michael McCourt
University of Washington Tacoma
Nonlinear analysis for control and estimation of human-machine teams
[PDF of presentation]
4:15Michael Sartori
Venable LLP
Control Through Intellectual Property
4:30Getting to know Panos Antsaklis
Sunday October 28
9:00Kevin Passino
The Ohio State University
Autonomy for the Others
[PDF of presentation]
9:15Hai Lin
University of Notre Dame
Challenges in achieving long-term autonomy
[PDF of presentation]
9:30Zhiqiang Gao
Cleveland State University
From the Autonomy of Control to the Autonomy of "Disturbance" Rejection
9:45Yue Wang
Clemson University
Trust-based Motion Planning, Decision Making and Control of Human-Robot Collaboration Systems
[PDF of presentation]
10:00Break
10:30Vijay Gupta
University of Notre Dame
Data-driven identification of control-oriented models for
passive systems
10:45Hasan Zakeri, Yang Yan, Etika Agarwal
University of Notre Dame
Recent results in resilient CPS design using passivity and dissipativity
[PDF of presentation]
11:00Getachew Befekadu
Morgan State University
On the asymptotics of exit problems for controlled Markov diffusion processes with random jumps and vanishing diffusion terms
[PDF of presentation]
11:15Luis Montestruque
EmNet LLC.
A Distributed Control Application to Urban Drainage Systems
[PDF of presentation]
11:30Nick Kottenstette
Corindus Vascular Robotics
A Secure Robotics Platform for Remote Vascular Interventions Including PCI and Stroke
[PDF of presentation]
11:45Meng Xia
The Mathworks
Lane Following Control with Sensor Fusion and Lane Detection
12:00Xenofon Koutsoukos
Vanderbilt University
Adversarial Regression for Detecting Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems
[PDF of presentation]
Closing

 

Accommodations

A block of rooms has been reserved for the attendees of the symposium for Friday, October 26 and Saturday, October 27, 2018 at:

Inn at Saint Mary’s
53993 Indiana State Route 933
South Bend IN 46637

Rate $135 plus tax (single or double occupancy) includes full hot breakfast.

Deadline for reservations at the conference rate: September 26, 2018. Reservations received after the cut-off date will be on a space and rate availability. 

Reservations should be made directly with the hotel at 574-232-2184, 574-232-4000, or reservations@innatsaintmarys.com. Please request the group rate for “Control Systems and the Quest for Autonomy”.

The hotel is across the street from Notre Dame Campus, within walking distance from the symposium venue.

https://goo.gl/maps/A6EZHz5R2n32

Click here for walking directions

 

Venue

The venue for the symposium is Eck Center Auditorium, next to Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore and very close to Notre Dame main entrance.

Click here for direction to the venue.

 

Parking

During the weekend visitors are allowed to park in the faculty/staff lots in addition to the visitors’ lots.
For the symposium in the Eck Center, park in the lot to the west of the bookstore lot – you will see the raised gates.
You may also park south of the stadium, close to Legends.

See on map: Bookstore’s Faculty & Staff Lot, Stadium B Lot

 

Contact

For general inquiries, contact passino[at]ece[dot]osu[dot]edu or Xenofon[dot]Koutsoukos[at]vanderbilt[dot]edu

Program chair: xiamenghit[at]gmail[dot]com

For issues with the website, contact  hzakeri[at]nd[dot]edu

You can reach Professor Panos Antsaklis at  antsaklis[dot]1[at]nd[dot]edu