Conference Highlights

Denver, Colorado, was the site of the 2003 American Control Conference, which was held at the Adams Mark Hotel from 4-6 June. There were 159 technical sessions organized in 18 parallel tracks. The 932 registered conference participants were from 34 countries (with 65% from the US); roughly 60 of these participants did not attend the conference due to SARS and Visa problems. Many of the conference details were highlighted in the December, 2003 issue of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine.

Conference Highlights included:

• 947 invited and contributed technical papers from over 1400 submissions
• 3 tutorial sessions
• 4 one-day workshops and one two-day workshop before the conference
• 3 plenary speakers
• Industrial and publisher exhibits
• Special sessions on the History of Important US Centers of Control, Advances in Smart Structures and Sensor Technologies, and an NSF CAREER program
• Interactive sessions, including a Roboflag competition
• Workshop for High School Teachers
• An optional dinner at The Fort in the foothills overlooking Denver (preceded by a stop at the Red Rocks amphitheatre

On Wednesday morning a number of presentations were given in a more interactive format (with Internet-enabled control, for example) than a typical conference presentation. One of the interactive sessions was a Roboflag competition, organized by Raffaello D'Andrea, the Wednesday Plenary Speaker. Also on Wednesday a workshop for High School Teachers was held. Roughly 25 teachers attended the plenary lecture, the interactive sessions, the History of Control Centers session, and a special afternoon session with lectures and discussions on various control topics.

Plenary lectures included "Robust Control of Large Scale Systems" by Raffaello D'Andrea, Cornell University; "Challenges and Opportunities in Control of Automotive Powertrain Systems" by Ilya Kolmanovsky, Ford Motor Company; and "Towards Automating the Scientific Method: Micro- and Nano- Robotic Instrumentation" by Ian Hunter, MIT.

A number of awards were presented at the Awards Luncheon on Thursday.
The Richard E. Bellman Heritage Award was given to Kumpati Narendra, Yale University, for pioneering contributions to stability theory, adaptive and learning systems theory, and for inspiring leadership as mentor, advisor and teacher over a period spanning four decades.
The Donald P. Eckman Award was presented to Clair Tomlin, Stanford University, for pioneering contributions to hybrid control systems and embedded software for real-time control, with application to air traffic control, avionics and computational biology.
The John R. Ragazzini Award was given to Stephen Boyd, Stanford University, for excellence in classroom teaching, textbook and monograph preparation, and undergraduate mentoring of students in the area of systems, control and optimization.
The Control Engineering Practice Award was presented to Edgar Bristol, Foxboro Co., for pioneering contributions to the relative gain array, pattern recognition, and adaptive control, and their innovative application to industrial process control.
The Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award (Theory) was given to the paper titled "Disturbance Propogation in Large Interconnected Systems" by Peter Seiler, Aniruddha Pant and Karl Hedrick, University of California, Berkeley.

Edgar Bristol (Control Engineering Practice), Christos Georgakis (AACC President), Kumpati Narendra (Bellman), Stephen Boyd (Ragazzini), Claire Tomlin (Eckman), Peter Seiler (Schuck) and Kishan Baheti (AACC Awards Chair)

There were 38 nominations for the best student paper award. The five finalists were:

Cedric Langbort and Raffaelo d'Andrea, Imposing boundary conditions for a class of spatially-interconnected systems
Iakovos Papadimitriou and Masayoshi Tomizuka, Fast Lane Changing Computations using Polynomials
Dhiraj Arora, Mikhail Skliar, and Robert Roemer, Nonlinear and Model Predictive Control of Thermal Dose in High Temperature Therapies
Islam Hussein, Daniel Scheeres, and David Hyland, Control of a Satellite Formation for Imaging Applications
Ying Tan and Jian-Xin Xu, A New Pointwise Adaptive Control Approach for Time-Varying Parameters with Known Periodicity

Student Award winners with Mark Balas (right), Vice Chair for Student Affairs

And the best paper award (based on both the paper and presentation) was presented to Iakovos Papadimitriou and Masayoshi Tomizuka.

Special surprise awards were given to Abe Haddad and Mal Beaverstock, for their dedication and tenure as AACC Secretary and Treasurer, respectively. Four former AACC Presidents took the stage, along with Christos Georgakis (AACC President) and Bill Levine (AACC Vice President), to honor Abe and Mal for their service.