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Recipients of Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award
Citation: For fundamental developments in and applications of dynamic games, multiple-person decision making, large scale systems analysis, and robust control
Biography: Tamer Basar is with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he holds the positions of the Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Center for Advanced Study Professor, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1946, and received B.S.E.E. degree from Robert College, Istanbul, in 1969, and M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University, in 1970, 1971 and 1972, respectively. He joined UIUC in 1981, after holding positions at Harvard University and Marmara Research Institute (Gebze, Turkey).
He has published extensively in systems, control, communications, and dynamic games, with over 400 publications, including two books (with several editions)--one on dynamic noncooperative game theory (with G.J. Olsder), and the other one on H inf-optimal control (with P. Bernhard). He has made fundamental contributions to a diverse set of topics, including decision making under uncertainty; information structures, stochastic teams, and differential games; large scale systems; hierarchical and decentralized control; worst-case identification, estimation, and control; H$^\infty$-optimal control for linear and nonlinear systems; robust adaptive control and filtering; distributed computation; and routing, congestion control, and pricing in networks. His current research interests are in modeling and control of communication networks; control over heterogeneous networks; usage-constrained sensing, estimation and control; network economics; mobile and distributed computing; security and trustworthiness in computer networks; and risk-sensitive estimation and control.
He has served in various capacities for several professional organizations, including IEEE, Control Systems Society (CSS), AACC, the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and the International Society of Dynamic Games (ISDG). He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Automatica, Editor of the Birkhauser Series on Systems & Control: Foundations & Applications, Editor of the Annals of ISDG, and member of editorial and advisory boards of several international journals in control, wireless networks, and applied mathematics.
He has received several awards and recognitions over the years, among which are the Medal of Science of Turkey (1993); Distinguished Member Award (1993), Axelby Outstanding Paper Award (1995) and Bode Lecture Prize (2004) of CSS; Millennium Medal of IEEE (2000); Tau Beta Pi Drucker Eminent Faculty Award of UIUC (2004); and the Outstanding Service Award (2005) and the Giorgio Quazza Medal (2005) of IFAC. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the European Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of IFAC, a past president of CSS, and the founding president of ISDG.
Text of acceptance speech, June 15, 2006. Minneapolis, MN
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I am honored to receive this most prestigious award and recognition by the American Automatic Control Council, named after Richard Ernest Bellman (the creator of "dynamic programming")---who has shaped our field and influenced through his creative ideas and voluminous multifaceted work the research of tens of thousands, not only in control, but also in several other fields and disciplines. In my own research, which has encompassed control, games, and decisions, I have naturally also been influenced by the work of Bellman (on dynamic programming), as well as of Rufus Isaacs (the creator of differential games) whose tenure at RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, California) partially overlapped with that of Bellman in the 1950s. I want to use the few minutes I have here to say a few words on those early days of control and game theory research (just a brief historical perspective), and Bellman's role in that development.
In a Bode Lecture I delivered (at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in the Bahamas) in December 2004, I had described how modern control theory was influenced by the research conducted and initiatives taken at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s. RAND had attracted and housed some of the great minds of the time, among whom was also Richard Bellman, in addition to names like Leonard D. Berkovitz, David Blackwell, George Dantzig, Wendell Fleming, M.R. Hestenes, Rufus Isaacs, Samuel Karlin, John Nash, J.P. LaSalle, and Lloyd Shapley (to list just a few). These individuals, and several others, laid the foundations of decision and game theory, which subsequently fueled the drive for control research. In this unique and highly conducive environment, Bellman started working on multi-stage decision processes, as early as 1949, but more fully after 1952---and it is perhaps a lesser known historical fact that one of the earlier topics Bellman worked on at RAND was ! game theory (both zero- and nonzero-sum games) on which he co-authored research reports with Blackwell and LaSalle. In an informative and entertaining autobiography he wrote 32 years later ("Eye of the Hurricane", World Scientific, Singapore), completed in 1984 shortly before his untimely death (March 19), Bellman describes eloquently the research environment at RAND and the reason for coining the term "dynamic programming".
At the time, the funding for RAND came primarily from the Air Force, and hence it was indirectly under the Secretary of Defense, who was in the early 1950s someone by the name Wilson. According to Bellman, "Wilson had a pathological fear and hatred of the word 'research' and also of anything 'mathematical' ". Hence, it was quite a challenge for Bellman to explain what he was doing and interested in doing in the future (which was research on multi-stage decision processes) in terms which would not offend the sponsor. "Programming" was an OK word; after all Linear Programming had passed the test. He wanted "to get across the idea that what he was doing was dynamic, multi-stage, and time-varying", and therefore picked the term "Dynamic Programming". He thought that "it was a term not even a Congressman could object to". This being the official reason given for his pick of the term, some say (Harold Kushner--recipient of this award two years ago--being one of them, based on a personal conversation with Bellman) that he wanted to upstage Dantzig's Linear Programming by substituting "dynamic" for "linear". Whatever the reasons were, the terminology (and of course also the concept and the technique) was something to stay with us for the next fifty plus years, and undoubtedly for many more decades into the future, as also evidenced by the number of papers at this conference using the conceptual framework of dynamic programming.
Applying dynamic programming to different classes of problems, and arriving at "functional equations of dynamic programming", subsequently led Bellman, as a unifying principle, to the "Principle of Optimality", which Isaacs, also at RAND, and at about the same time, had called "tenet of transition" in the broader context of differential games, capturing strategic dynamic decision making in adversarial environments.
Bellman also recognized early on that a solution to a multi-stage decision problem is not merely a set of functions of time or a set of numbers, but a rule telling the decision maker what to do, that is, a "policy". This led in his thinking, when he started looking into control problems, to the concept of "feedback control", and along with it to the notions of sensitivity and robustness. These developments, along with the more refined notions of information structures (who knows what and when), have been key ingredients in my research for the past thirty plus years.
It is interesting that at RAND at the time (that is in the 1950s), in spite of the anti-research and anti-mathematical attitude that existed in the higher echelons of the government, and the Department of Defense in particular, fundamental research did prosper, perhaps somewhat camouflaged initially, which in turn drove the creation of modern control theory, fueled also by the post-Sputnik anxiety. There is perhaps a message that should be taken from that: "Don't give up doing what you think and believe is right and important, but also be flexible and accommodating in how you promote it".
Before closing, I want to thank all who have been involved in the nomination process and the selection process of the Bellman Control Heritage Award this year. I want to use this occasion also to acknowledge several educational and research institutions which have impacted my life and career.
First, I want to acknowledge the contributions of the educational institutions in my native country, Turkey, in the early years of my upbringing, and the comfortable research environment provided by the Marmara Research Institute I was affiliated with in the mid to late 1970s.
Second, I want to acknowledge the love for research and the drive for pushing the frontiers of knowledge I was infected with during my years at Yale and Harvard in the early 1970s.
And last, but foremost, I want to acknowledge the perfect academic environment I found and have still been enjoying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign---wonderful colleagues, stimulating teaching environment at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and exemplary conducive research environment at the Coordinated Science Laboratory with its top quality graduate students.
I also want to recognize all students, post-docs, and colleagues I have had the privilege of having research interactions and collaborations with over the years. I thank them all for the memorable journeys in exploring the frontiers in control science and technology.
Thank you very much.
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Citation: For fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of digital, modern, adaptive, and multivariable control and for being a mentor, inspiration and friend to five decades of graduate students
Biography: Gene F. Franklin received the Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1950 the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1952, and the Doctor of Engineering Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 1955. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University from 1955-1957 and has been on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University since 1957 where he is now Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus. He was Vice Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1989-1994 and was Chairman of the Department for the 1994-1995 He was Director of the Information Systems Laboratory from its founding in 1962 until 1971 and was Associate Provost for Computing for Stanford University from 1971-1975.
He is co-author of three books: Sampled Data Systems, Digital Control of Dynamic Systems and Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems. The Second Edition of the last of these books received the IFAC prize as the best book in the controls area published during the period 1987-1990; the fifth edition is now in preparation. Professor Franklin has supervised the research of over 60 Ph.D. candidates in many aspects of control and systems.
He has for many years been an active member of the IEEE. He joined as a Student Member in April, 1950, and became a Life Fellow of the Institute in January, 1993. He was on the Board of Directors of the CSS from 1982 until 1988 and was Vice President for Technical Affairs for 1985 and 1986. He was General Chairman of the JACC of 1964 and General Chairman of the CDC in 1984. He received the Ragazzini Education Award of the AACC for 1985,.and gave the Bode Lecture at the1994 CDC. He is a Distinguished Member of the CSS and Franklin and Abramovitch were awarded the prize for the best paper published in the CSM in 2003. for their review of the control of disk drives.
Text of acceptance speech, June 9, 2005. Portland, OR
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'Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be'
Browning
I don't feel particularly old but to be in the midst of friends and colleagues with this recognition is as good as it gets.
I'd like to use these few minutes to comment on several of the times when I've come to a fork in the road as an illustration of how difficult it is to predict how a given path will turn out. There may be people who plan their lives carefully and take each step based on the best prediction of a good outcome; I'm not one of them. Too many events in my life were based on random events to pretend that they were based on any good planning of mine.
My first decision was a good one: I selected outstanding parents. My father was a math teacher, my mother an RN and they gave me a love of books and learning that have served me well for over 7 decades. They did, however, make one mistake: they gave me a defective gene that prevents me from seeing colors the way most others see them. If you see me going Ooh and Ah over a rainbow, don't believe it; I'm faking it.
The next decision I wish to mention was in 1945 when I became eligible for the military draft. The good news was that I was admitted to the Navy Radio Technician program but the bad news was that I had to sign up for four years to accept the offer. The evidence was that the war would last several more years so I signed up. That decision did not look so good a few weeks later when President Truman approved use of atomic bombs to reduce Hiroshima to rubble and Nagasaki to ruin in a matter of seconds. The war ended soon after but I was still stuck with four years obligation to the Navy. When I got to Chicago for my final physical, one of the doctors asked me to identify the numbers in a set of circles filled with colored dots. I'm sure that I gave him some values never before found! My performance was such that he marked me as partially disabled, put me on medical special assignment, and sent me off to the electronics school.
I finished the school in the summer of 1946 and was selected to be an instructor at a new campus being set up at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago. I taught electronic amplifiers there using the book Radio Engineering by F E Terman. One of my fellow students there later became well known in the control field (and a Vice President of IBM): Jack Bertram had also signed up for the Navy electronics program. In the early summer of 1947 my defective gene came to my rescue. The Navy announced that any sailor on medical special assignment was eligible for discharge! My response: That's ME.
Out of the Navy I went and set about looking for a school that would accept me at that late date. I was turned down by several fine schools but Georgia Tech told me to come on down so off I went to Atlanta where I got my EE degree in 1950. The months I'd served in the Navy made me eligible for enough GI Bill support to pay the tuition and expenses which I could never have afforded otherwise. This time the bad news was that in the spring of 1950 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the country was to graduate twice as many engineers as the economy could absorb. My only choice was to accept a fellowship to MIT and continue my education using the last of my GI Bill of Rights tuition support. As an aside, while there I took a graduate course on pulse and timing circuits that contained little new from what we had learned in the Navy program as high school graduates! I also had a great time learning how to play rugby from a group of graduate students from South Africa. A most memorable part of this experience was when we were one of the teams selected to play in a tournament as the entertainment for spring break in Bermuda.
After finishing my MS in 1952 I had married the love of my life and needed to get a job. A fellow student introduced me to Professor Jack Millman who was visiting MIT looking for possible appointments to Columbia University. I interviewed with him and was offered a position as Instructor which involved teaching responsibilities but allowed me to study for the doctorate at the same time. I had no idea that I was stepping into a fantastic center of control research assembled by John Ragazzini. With his colleague Lotfi Zadeh he had attracted great students including Eli Jury, Art Bergen, Jack Bertram, Rudy Kalman, Bernie Friedland, George Kranc, and Phil Sarachik. Sampled Data control was never the same again. The first treatment of 'pulsed circuits' was chapter 5 by Hurewicz in the Rad Lab Vol. 25 on The Theory of Servomechanisms edited by James Nichols and Phillips. Hurewicz selected the variable of discrete transforms as z, a prediction of one period and we kept the same convention. At about the time as Ragazzini's group were starting our study, some at MIT selected z to be a delay operator. In the end, z as predictor prevailed but to this day MATLAB treats discrete transforms differently in the Signal Processing toolbox as they do in the Control toolbox. You can look it up.
After I got my degree in 1955 I was promoted to Assistant Professor. I loved Columbia and was pleased to be selected by Professor Ragazzini to join him as co-author of a book on sampled data but New York City left a lot to be desired as a place to raise the two children who had joined my family by this time and soon another fork in the road appeared. It was presented in the person of Professor John Linvill whose class I had taken at MIT and who had moved from MIT to Stanford by way of Bell Labs. John knew Lotfi Zadeh and at his invitation came to Columbia looking for possible new appointments to Stanford's faculty. Again I interviewed and was offered a position on the Stanford Faculty. Thus it was that in late May of 1957 we loaded up the (non air-conditioned) Ford and headed west. I'll never forget the hot day in June when we stopped for gas in Sacramento where the temperature was well over 100 degrees. The pavement was so soft my shoes sank into the asphalt. Then later that day we crossed the mountains into the Bay Area and the temperature dropped about 1 degree per mile for the last 30 miles. We've been in love with the San Francisco Bay area ever since.
As an aside comment on control at the time, in the paper on The history of the Society by Danny Abramovitch and myself, George Axelby is quoted as saying that papers presented at the 1959 conference on control by Kalman and Bertram using state notation were 'quite a mystery to most attendees.' I'd say that the idea of state was not long a mystery to those who had worked with analog computers. On those machines, the only dynamic elements are integrators whose outputs comprise the state quite naturally. In my opinion, every control engineer should be required to program an analog computer where one also quickly learns the value of amplitude and time scaling too.
In any case, such was the random walk through time and space that has taken me from the mountains of North Carolina to the coast of California. My tenure at Stanford has been marked by many things but first and foremost in my affection has been the steady stream of excellent students with whom I have been privileged to work. Without a doubt they have made major contributions to control and to them is owed much of the credit for which this award in made. So let me close with the moral of my story aimed mainly to those in academia:
You can never be too careful when selecting your students.
The corollary to this is applicable to everyone:
It's hard to soar like an Eagle if you fly with a bunch of turkeys.
Thank you very much.
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Citation: For fundamental contributions to Stochastic Systems Theory and Engineering Applications, and for inspiring generations of researchers in the field
Biography: Harold J. Kushner received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1958. Since then, in ten books and more than two hundred papers, he has established a substantial part of modern stochastic systems theory. These include seminal developments of stochastic stability for both Markovian and non-Markovian systems, optimal nonlinear filtering and effective algorithms for approximating optimal nonlinear filters, stochastic variational methods and the stochastic maximum principle, numerical methods for jump-diffusion type control and game problems (the current methods of choice), efficient numerical methods for Markov chain models, methods for singularly perturbed stochastic systems, an extensive development of controlled stochastic networks such as queueing/communications systems under conditions of heavy traffic, methods for the analysis and approximation of systems driven by wideband noise, large-deviation methods for control problems with small noise effects, stochastic distributed and delay systems, and nearly optimal control and filtering for non-Markovian systems.
His work on stochastic approximations and recursive algorithms has set much of the current framework, and he has contributed heavily to applications of control methods to communications problems.
He is a past Chairman of the Applied Mathematics Department and past Director of the Lefschetz Center for Dynamical Systems, at Brown University, where he is currently a University Professor Emeritus.
Text of acceptance speech, July 1, 2004. Boston, MA
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It is a great honor to receive this award. It is a particular honor that it is in memory of Richard Bellman. I doubt that there are many here who knew Bellman, so I would like to make some comments concerning his role in the field.
Bellman left RAND after the summer of 1965 for the position of Professor of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine at the University of Southern California. This triple title gives you some inkling of how he was viewed at the time. I spent that summer at RAND. My office was right next to Bellman's and we had lots of opportunity to talk.
Bellman was always very supportive of my work. He encouraged me to write my first book, Stochastic Stability and Control, in 1967 for his Academic Press Series. Although naive by modern standards, the book seemed to have a significant impact on subsequent development in that it made many mathematicians realize that there was serious probability to be done in stochastic control, and established the foundations of stochastic stability theory. Numerical methods were among his strong interests. He was well acquainted with my work on numerical methods for continuous time stochastic systems and encouraged me to write my first book on the subject, later updated in two books with Paul Dupuis, and still the methods of choice. Despite his enormous output of published papers, something like 900, he was a strong believer in books since they allowed one to develop a subject with considerable freedom.
There are other connections, albeit indirect, between us. He was a New Yorker, and did his early undergraduate work at CCNY. During those years and, indeed, until the late 50's, CCNY was one of the most intellectual institutions of higher learning in the US. During that time, before the middle class migration out of the city, and the simultaneous opening of opportunities in the elite institutions for the "typical New Yorker," CCNY had the choice of the best of New Yorkers with a serious intellectual bent. Later, he switched to Brooklyn College, which was much closer to his home.
He intended to be a pure mathematician: His primary interest was analytic number theory. When did he become interested in applications? He graduated college at the start of WW2 and the demands of the war exposed him to a great variety of problems. He taught electronics in Princeton and then worked at a sonar lab in San Diego (which kept him out of the Army for a while). He spent the last two years of the war in the army, but assigned to the Manhattan project at Los Alamos. He was a social creature and it was easy for him to meet many of the talented people working on the project. Typically, the physicists considered a mathematician as simply a human calculator, ideally constructed to do numerical computations but not much more. Bellman was asked to numerically solve some PDE's. His mathematical pride refused. To the great surprise of the physicists, he actually managed to integrate some of the equations, obtaining closed form solutions. Holding true to tradition, they checked his solutions, not by verifying the derivation, but by trying some very special cases. Thus his reputation there as a very bright young mathematician was established. This jealously guarded independence and self confidence (and lack of modesty) continued to serve him well. During these years, he absorbed a great variety of scientific experiences. So much was being done due to the needs of the war.
There is one more indirect connection between us. Bellman was a student of Solomon Lefschetz at Princeton, head of the Math. Dept. at the time, a very tough minded mathematician and one of the powerhouses of American mathematics, and impressed with Bellman's ability. While at Los Alamos in WW2 Bellman worked out various results on stability of ODE's. Although he initially intended to do a thesis with someone else on a number theoretic problem, Lefschetz convinced him that those stability results were the quickest way to a thesis, which was in fact true. It took only several months and was the basis of his book on stability of ODE's. I was the director of the Lefschetz Center for Dynamical Systems at Brown University for many years, with Lefschetz our patron saint. Some of you might recall the book (not the movie) "A Beautiful Mind" about John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Game Theory, which describes Lefschetz's key role in mathematics during Nash's time at Princeton.
Bellman spent the summer of 1948 at RAND, where an amazing array of talent was gathered, including David Blackwell, George Dantzig, Ted Harris, Sam Karlin, Lloyd Shapley, and many others, who provided the foundations of much of decision and game theory. The original intention was to do mathematics with some of the RAND talent on problems of prior interest. But Bellman turned out to be fascinated and partially seduced by the excitement in OR, and the developing role of mathematics in the social and biological sciences. His mathematical abilities were widely recognized. He was a tenured Associate Professor at Stanford at 28, after being an Associate Professor at Princeton, where all indications were that he would have had an assured future had he remained there. He began to have doubts about the payoff for himself in number theory and returned to the atmosphere at RAND often, where he eventually settled and became fully involved in multistage decision processes, having been completely seduced, and much to our great benefit.
Here is a non mathematical item that should be of interest. To work at RAND one needed a security clearance, even though much of the work did not involve "security." Due to an anonymous tip, Bellman lost his clearance for a while: His brother-in-law, whom Bellman had not seen since he (his brother-in-law) was about 13, was rumored to be a communist? This was an example of a serious national problem that was fed, exploited, and made into a national paranoia by unscrupulous politicians.
Bellman was a remarkable person, thoroughly a man of his time and renaissance in his interests, with a fantastic memory. Some epochs are represented by individuals that are towering because of their powerful personalities and abilities. People who could not be ignored. Bellman was one of those. He was one of the driving forces behind the great intellectual excitement of the times.
The word programming was used by the military to mean scheduling. Dantzig's linear programming was an abbreviation of ``programming with linear
models." Bellman has described the origin of the name ``dynamic programming " as follows. An Assistant Secretary of the
Air Force, who was believed to be strongly anti-mathematics was to visit RAND. So Bellman was concerned that his work on
the mathematics of multi-stage decision process would be unappreciated. But ``programming" was still OK, and the Air Force was concerned with rescheduling continuously due to uncertainties. Thus ``dynamic programming" was chosen a politically wise descriptor. On the other hand, when I asked him the same question, he replied that he was trying to upstage Dantzig's linear programming by adding dynamic. Perhaps both motivations were true.
If one looks closely at scientific discoveries, ancient seeds often appear. Bellman did not quite invent dynamic programming, and many others contributed to its early development. It was used earlier in inventory control. Peter Dorato once showed me a (somwhat obscure) economics paper from the late thirties where something close to the principle of optimality was used. The calculus of variations had related ideas (e.g., the work of Caratheodory, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation). This led to conflicts with the calculus of variations community. But no one grasped its essence, isolated its essential features, and showed and promoted its full potential in control and operations research as well as in applications to the biological and social sciences, as did Bellman.
Bellman published many seminal works. It is sometimes claimed that many of his vast number of papers are repetitive and did not develop the ideas as far as they could have been. Despite this criticism, his works were poured over word for word, with every comment and detail mined for ideas, technique, and openings into new areas. His work was a mother lode. It was clearly the work of someone with a superb background in analysis as well as a facile mind and sharp eye for aplications. There are lots of examples, with broad coverage, accessible, and usually simple assumptions. His writing is articulate. It flows very smoothly through the problem formulation and mathematical analysis, and he is in full command of it.
We still owe a great debt to him.
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