It was a great honor to receive the Bode Lecture Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control on December 17, 2021. I presented the Bode Lecture on December 16, 2021. Title of my talk was Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: Role of Systems and Controls.

I was honored to be invited as a Plenary speaker at the 7th Indian Control Conference. My talk there was yesterday and it was entitled Cognitive Cyber-Physical Systems: Vision and Ideas for Exploring a New Frontier.

These presentations marked the end of 2021 for me! Looking forward to 2022.

Slides and video can be found on the Presentations page of this website.

On May 12-13, 2021, Jim Kurose, Cheryl Martin, Susan Martinis, and I co-organized an NSF sponsored workshop to discuss the creation of National Networks of Research Institutes. This concept was created to respond to the national need for new types of research institutes that embrace both use-inspired basic research and the active, intentional translation of that research into products and services. The workshop brought together more than 70 leading thinkers from academia, industry, philanthropic foundations, federal agencies, and non-profit organizations, as well as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The workshop report is now public. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

I have added three new presentations to the website:

1. Convergence Research Paradigm: Role for Engineering — this was a keynote talk I gave at the Emerging Technologies Summit of the ECE Department Heads Association (ECEDHA).
2. Control for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation — I spoke on behalf of a panel of colleagues from the controls community at the IEEE Control Systems Workshop on Control for Societal Challenges.
3. Neuro-Cognitive Science Inspired Directions in Learning for Control — this was an invited talk at the Workshop on Cognition and Control organized by Aranya Chakrabortty at the 2021 American Control Conference.

Kishan Baheti passed away on March 9, 2021 after COVID-19 illness. He was a great friend for more than 30 years. I wrote a short tribute in his memory.

I was invited to speak at the Trusted AI Challenge Series organized by Air Force Research Lab and State University of New York. Other speakers included: Dr. Peter Friedland, Systems Plus/Senior Scientific Advisor to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Prof. Scott Hubbard, Stanford University (former Director NASA Ames Research Center), Dr. David Goldstein, Space X, Dr. Elham Tabassi, Chief of Staff, Information Technology Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Welcoming remarks were made by Dr. Bryant Wysocki, United States Air Force Technical Advisor for Command, Control, Communications, Computing, Intelligence & Cyber, Air Force Research Laboratory, Michael Graniero, Small Business Professional, Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Directorate, ‍Dr. Meera Sampath, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, State University of New York, and Professor David Doermann, State University of New York, University at Buffalo.

My talk was A Perspective on Trust in Machine Learning and Control for Dynamic Autonomous Systems.  Video of the event is here.

I was invited to speak at the Workshop on OpenEyes: Eye Gaze in AR, VR, and in the Wild, at the ECCV 2020. My presentation was entitled Kalman Filtering, Sensor Fusion, and Eye Tracking, Video of the session including my talk is here.  OpenEyes Workshop, August 2020.

I have been deeply interested in the topic of Broader Impacts, one of two merit review criteria for NSF proposals. I was invited to present my ideas by the University of Texas at Dallas. You can find slides of my talk Strategic Thinking for Achieving Broader Impacts.  Video of the talk is here.

 

Earlier in July 2020, American Control Conference and International Federation for Automatic Control World Congress, which were to be held in Denver and Berlin, were held as virtual online meetings. While it was a pity that I could not meet colleagues in person, a positive was that I ended up making videos of presentations for the virtual meetings. These are now included in the Presentations and Papers sections:

• I organized a Tutorial Session (which was actually held as a live track) on Systems and Control Opportunities for Decarbonization of the Energy System. I invited Professors Anu Annaswamy (MIT), Mario Rotea (UT Dallas), and Jakob Stoustrup (Aalborg) to contribute their presentations. My own presentation was entitled Energy System and Decarbonization Challenge.
• I was honored to be invited to make a presentation in a tutorial session organized by Professors M. Vidyasagar (IIT Hyderbad) and B. Touri (UC San Diego) on the topic of Learning and Control: Opportunities and Challenges. My talk was entitled Cognitive Cyber-Physical Systems: Cognitive Neuroscience, Machine Learning, and Control. An extended abstract appears in the ACC Proceedings.
• Meera Sampath and I published and presented a paper entitled A Framework for Ethics in Cyber-Physical Systems in the IFAC World Congress. A paper appears in the Proceedings of IFAC World Congress.

I was very fortunate to receive the 2019 IEEE Control Systems Award. The award was presented at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Nice, France, on December 12, 2019. The video of the speech is here and the text of the acceptance speech is here.

Meera Sampath and I have written a new paper on the topic of ethics of cyber-physical-human systems. From the abstract of the paper:

“This paper  focuses on a conceptual framework for consideration of ethical issues in the emerging category of smart cyber-physical systems. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) that bring together controls, communications, computing and physical systems are being developed in a wide variety of application domains ranging from transportation, energy, manufacturing, to biomedical and agriculture. Increasingly, cyber-physical systems are integrating internet-of-things, data science, and machine learning technologies leading to smart cyber-physical systems. Smart CPS are already being and will increasingly be deployed to work with humans, in workplaces, homes, or public spaces, resulting in the creation of cyber-physical human systems (CPHS).

Ethical issues in CHP and CPHS can be framed within the larger frameworks of ethics of technology and ethics of artificial intelligence. We begin with a description of trends and visions for the future development of smart CPS. We next outline fundamental theories of ethics that offer foundations for thinking about ethical issues in smart CPS. We argue that it is necessary to fight the tendency towards technological determinism. We argue that in analyzing ethics of smart CPS, we need to anticipate increasing capabilities and the future deployment of such systems. Ultimately, if these systems are widely deployed in society, they will have a very significant impact, including possible negative consequences, on individuals, communities, nations, and the world. Our framework has two main dimensions: (i) stage of development of CPHS domain and (ii) locus of decision making: individual, organizational and government settings.”

I was honored to give a plenary presentation earlier this week on October 16, 2019, at the ESWEEK conference in New York City. In this talk, I proposed the concept of Cognitive Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as a vision for the next frontier in CPS. The idea is to systematically incorporate cognitive functions and capabilities in CPS. I suggested that this will be the most expansive vision of the future and allow CPS to leverage advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. I also hypothesized that Cognitive CPS will facilitate human augmentation and human flourishing. The slides are posted in the Presentations section of this website.

There was a symposium at the University of Michigan on September 14, 2019 to the celebrate and honor the life of Professor Elmer Gilbert, an intellectual giant in the field of controls, who passed away on June 16, 2019:

https://aero.engin.umich.edu/a-symposium-honoring-the-life-of-elmer-g-gilbert/

Elmer was my mentor and dear friend for more than 30 years. He was an exceedingly kind, generous, thoughtful man and a deep thinker. I met him for the first time when he and his wife Dr. Lois Verbrugge, renowned social scientist, came to the University of Minnesota in 1985. He played a central role in my move to the University of Michigan  in 1989. It was an honor to speak about his work on controllability, observability, and Gilbert realization at the symposium. It is particularly interesting that this ground-breaking work intersected with the pioneering work of my advisor late Professor R. E. Kalman! My slides are posted in the presentation section and can be downloaded from

https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/khargonekar/files/2019/09/Gilbert_MIchigan_PPK.pdf