Welcome to the December edition of the DISC newsletter! At the moment we are busy preparing for the upcoming Benelux Meeting in March. Thanks to the organizing committee (Mircea Lazar, Raffaella Carloni and Bayu Jayawardhana) we already have three excellent invited speakers. The abstract submission opened on December 1 so we hope that many PhD’s and staff members will also join.
We are also preparing the Summer School and there will be an update on that soon. Due to circumstances we will not offer a Winter course this year.
This is the last newsletter of the year so though it is a little early we will already wish you happy holidays and all the best for 2018!
With best regards,
Henk Nijmeijer,
scientific director
Martha Otte,
DISC secretariat
In January 2018 the following DISC courses will start:
Mathematical Models of Systems
J.W. Polderman and H. Trentelman
Nonlinear Control Systems
B. Jayawardhana
B. Besselink
This academic year the following courses are scheduled:
Model reduction for Control, from Linear to Nonlinear Systems
Adaptive Control
Linear Matrix Inequalities in Control
Mathematical Models of Systems
Nonlinear Control Systems
Multi-agent Network Dynamics and Games
Design Methods for Control Systems
System Identification
The courses are taught at cursus en vergadercentrum Domstad in Utrecht, location Koningsbergerstraat 9. For more information see their website.
The Organizing Committee has the pleasure of inviting you to participate in the
37th Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control
to be held in “Kontakt der Kontinenten”, Soesterberg, The Netherlands, on March 27 – 29, 2018.
The aim of this meeting is to promote research activities and cooperation between researchers in Systems and Control. It is the thirty-seventh in a series of annual conferences that are held alternately in Belgium and The Netherlands. The Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control is an important yearly event where academics and PhD students from The Netherlands and Belgium meet each other both scientifically and socially. Additionally, the Benelux Meetings serve as a training platform for PhD students to present and discuss their work in an -informal- international setting. The meeting takes place under the auspices of the Dutch Institute of Systems and Control (DISC).
Website
http://www.beneluxmeeting.nl/2018/
Invited speakers
Professor Dongheui Lee, Technical University of Munich, Germany will lecture on “Robot learning through physical interaction and human guidance”.
Professor Tamas Keviczky, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands will lecture on the topic of “Distributed optimization in model predictive control and smart grid energy systems”.
In addition, there will be a Minicourse by Professor Murat Arcak, Berkeley University California, USA on “Networks of Dissipative Systems: Compositional Certification of Stability, Performance, and Safety”.
Important dates
Abstract submission opens December 1, 2017
Registration opens January 8, 2018
Deadline abstract submission January 22, 2018
Notification of acceptance February 5, 2018
Deadline final abstract submission February 19, 2018
Deadline early registration February 7, 2018
Conference program and BOA ready March 15, 2018
We hope to welcome you at the 37th Benelux Meeting of Systems and Control!
Next fall (30-10-2018—01-11-2018) there will be a conference in Eindhoven on Analysis and Control of Chaotic systems (CHAOS 2018)
(http://chaos2018.wtb.tue.nl/)
This conference is the fifth IFAC meeting related to analysis and control of chaotic systems. It will provide a forum for the presentation of new developments in the important interdisciplinary field of chaos control, synchronization and complex networks. The research activity in this field is driven by the needs of different application domains such as: biology (brain dynamics, heart beating, etc.), physics (optics, magnetics, fluid dynamics, etc.), mechanics, engineering (non-linear dynamics of electronic and power electronic systems, chaos encrypted signals, walking robots, etc.), economics (critical decision, etc.), chemical engineering, and so on. The aim of the conference is to provide the communities of control engineering, physics, economics, biology, fluid dynamics, power electronics, electronic circuits, etc. with an opportunity to exchange information and new ideas and to discuss new developments in the field of chaos control and synchronization. Both theory and applications will be discussed.
The conference will cover all topics related to chaos and synchronization within the framework of control systems theory and engineering, including (but not limited to) the following
• Control of complex systems.
• Bifurcations in complex systems.
• Nonlinear time series and identification.
• Limit cycles in networks of oscillators.
• Brain dynamics.
• Small world networks.
• Applications (biology, chemical engineering, physics, electrical engineering)
• Control and observation via communication constraints.
• Providing a discussion forum for the physics, chaos and control system communities.
Doctoral candidate Temitope Agbana, who works at the DCSC Department on a TU Delft Global fellowship, together with his colleague Hai Gong received the Silver Edmund Optics Educational award for his Optical Smart Malaria Diagnostic Project last month. They aim at realizing accurate diagnosis of malaria with a click of a button. With the supervision of professors Gleb Vdovin and Michel Verhaegen, Agbana aims at realizing an innovative and handy optical instrument, that is able to detect early-stage malaria in a cheap and efficient manner. The instrument is meant to operate with minimal human intervention using low-cost optical hardware with smart algorithms to detect the parasite in label free infected blood sample.
The Edmund Optics Educational Award is an award given in recognition of outstanding undergraduate and graduate optics programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at non-profit colleges and universities worldwide. Usually there are over 600 applicants from around the world for this award.
Read more about the 2017 winners here
Anahita Jamshidnejad has been awarded a Niels Stensen Fellowship for a one-year postdoctoral research stay at ETH Zurich.
The Niels Stensen Fellowship has been awarded annually to outstanding researchers who recently received their PhD to enable them to gain research experience at a top university or institute abroad. The aim of the Niels Stensen Fellowship is to encourage these talented young researchers by means of facilitating their academic research abroad.
Manuel Mazo is promoted to Associate Professor at the Delft Center for Systems and Control from November 1st, 2017. Manuel Mazo received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California in 2010. He joined DCSC as an assistant professor in 2012 and was recently awarded an ERC starting grant. Manuel’s main area of research is control of cyber-physical systems. The focus of his research is on the interactions between physical systems and the communication and computation platforms and algorithms employed to control them.
Delft University of Technology
Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC)
Dr. Sergio Grammatico offers a PhD position in the context of the project “Complex Network Games: The Scenario Approach” (OMEGA), funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for curiosity-driven research in Mathematics. The candidate will conduct fundamental, multi-disciplinary, research on complex multi-agent systems characterized by the presence of: (i) noncooperative (e.g. selfish) agents; (ii) complex networks that define the inter-dependence between objective functions and constraints, and the information exchange; (iii) uncertain variables and probabilistic constraints. The key challenge is to design structured multi-agent dynamics that converge to an efficient equilibrium solution, despite the presence of uncertainty. With this aim, stochastic or randomized methods, e.g. the scenario approach, shall be developed for game theory. Application areas include smart power grids and automated driving.
Read the full text here.
Maastricht University
Shared UHasselt – MUMC+ (double degree) PhD position Noninvasive electrocardiographic imaging for improved mechanistic understanding and risk stratification of ventricular tachyarrhythmias
The research teams of MUMC+ (Maastricht, the Netherlands) and UHasselt (Hasselt, Belgium) collaborate to improve understanding of cardiac arrhythmias and are now hiring a PhD candidate. If you have a MSc degree in Biomedical Engineering, Technical Medicine, Knowledge Engineering, or Applied Mathematics, and you have a demonstrable interest in computational modeling, cardiac imaging, image integration, and/or arrhythmology, this may be a unique opportunity to join internationally renowned investigators on the topic of ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.
Our projects focus on the:
(1) establishing of a registry of patients in the Maastricht-Hasselt region with potentially life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias and risk for sudden cardiac death;
(2) characterizing the substrate of such arrhythmias with the novel modality noninvasive electrocardiographic imaging and with invasive intracardiac recordings; and
(3) mechanistic study of arrhythmogenesis with computational modeling.
For the full text click here.
Delft University of Technology
Name: Nikolaos Moustakis
Starting date: 15-10-2017
Function: PhD
Email: n.moustakis@tudelft.nl
Group: DCSC
Supervisor: Dr. Jan-Willem Wingerden and Dr. Jens Kober
Greetings, my name is Nikolaos Moustakis. I received a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Patras, Greece, and I recently graduated with Master’s in Systems and Control from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. My dissertation project was the study of quantized adaptive control for uncertain linear systems and uncertain switched time-driven linear systems, under the supervision of Prof. Simone Baldi. Currently, I am working on my PhD which is a joint project by two companies and co-supervised by professors Jan-Willem Wingerden and Jens Kober. My PhD project is devoted to the improvement of state-of-the-art conventional controllers for wind turbines, exploiting artificial network-based methods. I enjoy playing sports and meet new people.
Name: Tamas Bates
Starting date: 01-10-2017
Function: PhD
Email: t.bates@tudelft.nl
Group: CoR (Cognitive Robotics)
Supervisor: Dr. Jens Kober
Tamas Bates completed his master’s degree in Informatics at the TU Munich, Germany, in 2017 and has recently joined the Cognitive Robotics group at TU Delft as a PhD candidate. During his master’s he worked on imitation learning and data visualization using augmented and virtual reality, as well as computer vision for humanoid robots. His research currently focuses on physical human-robot interaction and communication of intentions between humans and robots.
Eindhoven University of Technology
Name: Caiyang Wei
Starting date: 01-11-2017
Function: PhD
Email: C.Wei.1@tue.nl
Group: Control Systems Technology
Supervisor: Theo Hofman
Hello, my name is Caiyang, 28 years old, and I am from China. My family members are living in both China and Australia. You can also call me Joshua if you like, my English name. I studied mechatronics and automotive before. I just finished my PDEng in automotive systems design and started PhD two days ago. Regarding research topic, I mainly focus on integrated energy and thermal management system for hybrid electric vehicles. About hobbies, I work out regularly. I also like reading in my spare time.
Name: Noud Mooren
Starting date: 01-12-2017
Function: PhD
Email: N.F.M.Mooren@tue.nl
Group: Control Systems Technology
Supervisor: Tom Oomen / Gert Witvoet
Project: I-MECH Wtb
Delft University of Technology
Candidate: Sjoerd Tijmons
Group: Aerospace Engineering (Control and Simulation)
Thesis: Autonomous Flight of Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles
Promotor: Prof.dr.ir. M. Mulder
Date: 12 December 2017
Location: Aula, TU Delft
Time: 15h00
University of Twente
Candidate: M. (Mark) Vlutters
Group: ET – BW
Thesis: Foot placement in balance recovery – complex humans vs simple model
Promotor: Prof.dr.ir. Herman van der Kooij
Date: 13 December 2017
Location: Waaier
Time: 12:45
Eindhoven University of Technology
Candidate: Bahadir Saltik
Group: Control Systems group
Thesis: On Risk-Aware Model Based Control Strategies: Theory and Applications
Promotor: Prof. dr. S. Weiland
Date: 9 januari 2018
Location: TU/e Auditorium
Time: 16.00 h.
Candidate: Koen Verkerk
Group: Control Systems group
Thesis: Improved accuracy of flexible systems by state estimation: An application to high precision motion systems
Promotor: Prof. dr. ir. P.P.J. van den Bosch
Date: 17 januari 2018
Location: TU/e Auditorium
Time: 16.00 h.
The next issue of this Newsletter will appear in January 2018.
We encourage the contributors to provide newsworthy information. In principle, we intend to publish any message offered. However, we reserve the right to edit certain parts of a submission.
Please send your contributions to: m.w.otte@tudelft.nl
