American Automatic Control Council - Recipients of Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award

Recipients of Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award

2004 H.J. Kushner	2005 G.F. Franklin	2006 T. Basar	2007
2003 K.S. Narendra	2002 P.V. Kokotovic	2001 A.V. Balakrishnan	2000 W.H. Ray	1999 Y.-C. Ho
1998 L.A. Zadeh	1997 R.E. Kalman	1996 E.G. Gilbert	1995 M. Athans	1994 J.B. Cruz, Jr.
1993 E.I. Jury	1992 R. Aris	1991 J.G. Truxal	1990 A.E. Bryson, Jr.	1989 R.W. Brockett
1988 W.R. Evans	1987 J. Lozier	1986 J. Zaborszky	1985 H. Chestnut	1984 R.E. Bellman
1983 J.V. Breakwell	1982 I. Lefkowitz	1981 C.S. Draper	1980 N.B. Nichols	1979 H.W. Bode

2006: Tamer Basar

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

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.

2005: Gene F. Franklin

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

'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.

2004: Harold J. Kushner

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

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.

2003: Kumpati S. Narendra

Citation: 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.

Biography: Kumpati S.Narendra received the Bachelor of Engineering degree, with Honors, in Electrical Engineering from Madras University, India in 1954, and the M.S.and Ph.D.degrees in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1955 and 1959, respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow from 1959 to 1961, and Assistant Professor from 1961 to 1965 at Harvard. He joined the Department of Engineering and Applied Science at Yale University as an Associate Professor in 1965, and was made Professor in 1968.

Professor Narendra received an honorary M.A.degree from Yale in 1968, and an honorary D.Sc.degree from his alma mater in Madras, India in 1995. At Yale, he has served as the chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department (1984-87)and the director of the Neuroengineering and Neuroscience Center (1995- 96). Currently, he is the Howard W. Cheel Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Center for Systems Science. Professor Narendra has authored more than 175 technical papers, written three books (with co-authors J. H. Taylor, A. M. Annaswamy, and M. A. L. Thathachar), edited four others, advised 41 doctoral students and over 30 postdoctoral fellows, and consulted for more than a dozen corporate research laboratories. He has lectured at more than 40 universities worldwide and, since 1993, has delivered more than 45 plenary, keynote, and invited lectures at international conferences and research laboratories in the U. S. and abroad. He has received numerous awards, including the Education Award of the AACC (1990), the Leadership Award of the Neural Networks Society (1994), the Bode Prize of the IEEE (1995), as well as the best paper awards of three different societies of the IEEE (SMC 1972, CSS 1988, Neural Network Council 1991). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1987), the IEE [UK ](1981), and a Life Fellow of the IEEE. He has served on various national and international and ISA awards. He is currently a fellow of the ISA,and a current or past member of the IEEE, AIChE, ACM, and MAA, and is active nationally and locally in a number of groups within these organizations.

2002: Petar V. Kokotovich

Citation: For pioneering contribution to control theory and engineering, and for inspirational leadership as mentor, advisor, and lecturer over a period spanning four decades.

Biography: Petar V. Kokotovic received graduate degrees in 1962 from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and in 1965 at the Institute of Automation and Remote Control, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow. During his studies, he worked for two six month periods in 1956, at Electricite de France, Paris and then in 1957, at AEG, Stuttgart, Germany. From 1959 until 1966, he was with the Pupin Reseach Institute in Belgrade, Yugoslvia. From 1966 until 1990 he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he held the endowed Grainger Chair. In 1991 he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he is currently the Director of the Center for Control Engineering and Computation.

In the 1960’s, Kokotovic developed the sensitivity points method, a precursor to adaptive control, still in use for automatic tuning of industrial controllers. In the 1970’s, he pioneered singular perturbation techniques for multi-time-scale design of control systems and flight trajectories, which found widespread applications. One of them was a coherency aggregation methodology for large scale Markov chains and power systems. In the 1980’s, Kokotovic and coworkers identified the main forms of adaptive systems instability and introduced redesigns that made adaptive controllers more robust. Kokotovic’s current research is in nonlinear control, both robust and adaptive. He initiated the development of a popular nonlinear recursive design-backstepping, and its use for robust and adaptive nonlinear control. As a long-term industrial consultant, Kokotovic contributed to the design of computer controls for car engines and automotive systems at Ford, and to power system stability analysis at General Electric. Recently, he led a five-year collaborative research (with United Technologies) on nonlinear control of axial compressors for jet engines.

Professor Kokotovic supervised some 30 Ph.D. students and 20 postdoctoral researchers. With them he co-authored numerous papers and ten books, four of which appeared in 1995-96. Professor Kokotovic is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He is the recipient of the two highest control engineering awards: 1990 Quazza Medal by the International Federation of Automatic Control, and the 1995 Control Systems Field Award by the IEEE. He also received an Eminent Faculty Award, two Outstanding IEEE Transactions Paper Awards (1983 and 1993), and delivered the 1991 IEEE Control Systems Society Bode Prize Lecture. His most recent recognition is the 2002 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal.

2001: A.V. Balakrishnan

Citation: For pioneering contributions to stochastic and distributed systems theory, optimization, control, and aerospace flight systems research.

Biography: A.V. Balakrishnan earned his M.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Southern California in 1950 and 1954, respectively. Prof. Balakrishnan has been with the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1961; he has been a Professor of Engineering since 1962 and a Professor of Mathematics since 1965. He was Chair of the Department of Systems Science in the (then) School of Engineering from 1969-1975. Since 1985, he has served as the appointed Director of the NASA-UCLA Flight Systems Research Center. Dr. Balakrishnan also lends his expertise to industry and the government, including Optimization Software, Inc., NADC US Navy, and the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.

Professor Balakrishnan holds patents on the "modes of interconnected lattice trusses using continuum models, and "laser beam log amplitude temporal scintillation spectrum due to crosswind". He has received honors and awards from the International Federation of Information Processing Society (1977), NASA (1978, 1992,1995, and 1996), and, in 1980, the Guillemin Prize in recognition of the major impact that his original contributions have had in setting the research direction of communications and control. Most recently, Prof. Balakrishnan has been selected as the 2001 awardee for the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, which is the highest recognition of professional achievement for US control systems engineers and scientists. He has published over 200 papers, and has authored or edited over 10 books.

Prof. Balakrishnan is a Lifetime Fellow of IEEE, a member of the International Scientific Radio Union, the Chair of the IFIP Technical Committee 7 and of Working Group 7.1, and the President of the ComCon Conference Board.

2000: W. Harmon Ray

Citation:

Biography: Dr. W. Harmon Ray is Vilas Research Professor and past chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He received his B.A. and B.S.Ch.E. from Rice University and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1966. Before joining the University of Wisconsin he was a faculty member at the University of Waterloo in Canada, from 1966 to 1970, and at the State University of New York at Buffalo, from 1970 to 1976. Professor Ray has had extensive industrial consulting experience, and has contributed numerous articles to the technical literature in the areas of polymerization processes, chemical reaction engineering, process modelling, optimization, and process dynamics and control. He is co-author of a monograph, Process Optimization, published in 1973, and author of Advanced Process Control which appeared in 1981. This latter book has been published in Russian and Chinese. Professor Ray is also co-editor of two volumes: Distributed Parameter Systems (1978), and Dynamics and Modelling of Reacting Systems (1980). More recently, he is the coauthor of the textbook, Process Dynamics, Modeling, and Control (1994).

In 1969, Professor Ray received the D. P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council and spent a year, in 1973-74, as a Guggenheim Fellow in Europe. In 1981 he received the Arthur K. Doolittle Award of the Organic Coatings and Plastics Division of the American Chemical Society and also the Automatica Prize Paper Award of the International Federation of Automatic Control. In addition, he was the recipient of the 1982 Professional Progress Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineeers. In 1989 Prof. Ray received the Control Education Award from the American Automatic Control Council. Professor Ray has been a distinguished lecturer at a number of universities including the Lacey Lectures at Caltech, the Reilly Lectures at Notre Dame, the Kelley Lecture at Purdue, and the Sargent Lecture at Imperial College London.

Prof. Ray is a Fellow of AIChE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

1999: Y.-C. Ho

Citation: For sustained and significant contributions to research and education in optimization and control of dynamic systems, and his establishment of a new branch of these fields, Discrete Event Dynamic Systems

Biography: Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho received his S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Except for three years of full time industrial work he has been on the Harvard Faculty. Since 1969 he has been Gordon McKay Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics. Since 1989, he has been the T. Jefferson Coolidge Chair in Applied Mathematics and Gordon McKay Professor of Systems Engineering at Harvard. He was also the visiting professor to the Cockrell Family Regent's Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin in 1989

He has published over 140 articles and three books, one of which (co-authored with A.E. Bryson, Jr.) has been translated into both Russian and Chinese and made the list of Citation Classics as one of the most referenced works on the subject of optimal control. He is on the editorial boards of several international journals and is the editor-in-chief of the international Journal on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems. He is the recipient of various fellowships and awards including the Guggenheim (1970) and the IEEE Field Award for Control Engineering and Science (1989), the Chiang Technology Achievement Prize (1993). He is a Life fellow of IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the Control Systems Society, and was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1987). In addition to service on various governmental and industrial panels, and professional society administrative bodies, he was the President of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society in 1988 and co-founder of Network Dynamics, Inc., a software firm specializing in industrial automation.

His research interests lie at the intersection of Control System Theory, Operations Research, and Artificial Intelligence. He has contributed to topics range from optimal control, differential games, information structure, multi-person decision analysis, to incentive control, and since 1983, exclusively to discrete event dynamic systems, perturbation analysis, ordinal optimization, and computational intelligence.

1998: Lotfi Zadeh

Citation: For fundamental contributions to systems theory and pioneering works on fuzzy sets and systems leading to a global trend on machine intelligence quotient systems

Biography: Lotfi A. Zadeh joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959, and served as its chairman from 1963 to 1968. Earlier, he was a member of the electrical engineering faculty at Columbia University. In 1956, he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In addition, he held a number of other visiting appointments, among them a visiting professorship in Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1962 and 1968; a visiting scientist appointment at IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA, in 1968, 1973, and 1977; and visiting scholar appointments at the AI Center, SRI International, in 1981, and at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, in 1987-1988. Currently he is a Professor in the Graduate School, and is serving as the Director of BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing).

Until 1965, Dr. Zadeh's work had been centered on system theory and decision analysis. Since then, his research interests have shifted to the theory of fuzzy sets and its applications to artificial intelligence, linguistics, logic, decision analysis, control theory, expert systems and neural networks. Currently, his research is focused on fuzzy logic, soft computing and computing with words. An alumnus of the University of Teheran, MIT, and Columbia University, Dr. Zadeh is a fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, ACM and AAAI, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was the recipient of the IEEE Education Medal in 1973 and a recipient of the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984. In 1989, Dr. Zadeh was awarded the Honda Prize by the Honda Foundation, and in 1991 received the Berkeley Citation, University of California. In 1992, Dr. Zadeh was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal "for seminal contributions to information science and systems, including the conceptualization of fuzzy sets." He became a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (Computer Sciences and Cybernetics Section) in 1992 and received the Certificate of Commendation for AI Special Contributions Award from the International Foundation for Artificial Intelligence. Also in 1992, he was awarded the Kampe de Feriet Medal and became an Honorary Member of the Austrian Society of Cybernetic Studies.

In 1993, Dr. Zadeh received the Rufus Oldenburger Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers "for seminal contributions in system theory, decision analysis, and theory of fuzzy sets and its applications to AI, linguistics, logic, expert systems and neural networks." He was also awarded the Grigore Moisil Prize for Fundamental Researches, and the Premier Best Paper Award by the Second International Conference on Fuzzy Theory and Technology. In 1995, Dr. Zadeh was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor "for pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications." In 1996, Dr. Zadeh was awarded the Okawa Prize "for outstanding contribution to information science through the development of fuzzy logic and its applications." In 1997, Dr. Zadeh was awarded the B. Bolzano Medal by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic "for outstanding achievements in fuzzy mathematics." He also received the J.P. Wohl Career Achievement Award of the IEEE Systems, Science and Cybernetics Society. He served as a Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Visitor, lecturing at the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and as the Gulbenkian Foundation Visiting Professor at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal.

Dr. Zadeh holds honorary doctorates from Paul-Sabatier University, Toulouse, France; State University of New York, Binghamton, NY; University of Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany; University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain; University of Granada, Granada, Spain; Lakehead University, Canada; University of Louisville, KY; Baku State University, Azerbaijan; and the Silesian Technical University, Gliwice, Poland. Dr. Zadeh has authored close to two hundred papers and serves on the editorial boards of over fifty journals. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board, U.S. Postal Service; Advisory Committee, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC Santa Barbara; Advisory Board, Fuzzy Initiative, North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany; Fuzzy Logic Research Center, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas; Advisory Committee, Center for Education and Research in Fuzzy Systems and Artificial Intelligence, Iasi, Romania; Senior Advisory Board, International Institute for General Systems Studies; the Board of Governors, International Neural Networks Society; and is the Honorary President of the Biomedical Fuzzy Systems Association of Japan and the Spanish Association for Fuzzy Logic and Technologies.

1997: R.E. Kalman

Citation: For fundamental contributions to control and system theory

Biography: R.E. Kalman was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 19, 1930. He received the bachelor's degree (S.B.) and the masterís degree (S.M.) in electrical engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 and 1954, respectively. He received the doctorate degree (D.Sci.) from Columbia University in 1957. His major positions include that of Research Mathematician at the Research Institute for Advanced Study in Baltimore, 1958-1964; Professor at Stanford University 1964-1971; Graduate Research Professor at the Center for Mathematical System Theory, University of Florida, Gainesville 1971-1993. Moreover, since 1973 he has also held the chair for Mathematical System Theory at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zurich.

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the IEEE Medal of Honor (1974), the IEEE Centennial Medal (1984), the Kyoto Prize in High Technology from the Inamori foundation, Japan (1985), the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society (1987). He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a foreign member of the Hungarian and French Academies of Science, and has received a number of honorary doctorates. Kalman's first major contribution was the introduction of the self-tuning regulator in adaptive control. Between 1959 and 1964 Kalman wrote a series of seminal papers. First, the new approach to the filtering problem, known today as Kalman Filtering was put forward. In the meantime, the all pervasive concept of controllability and its dual, the concept of observability, were formulated. By combining the filtering and the control ideas, the first systematic theory for control synthesis, known today as the Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian or LQG theory, resulted. The next contribution was the solution of the black box modelling problem in the linear case, known as realization theory. This problem involves the construction of the state from input/output measurements. The next milestone in the sequence of contributions was the introduction of module theory to the study of linear systems.

Over the past 15 years Kalman has devoted his efforts to the understanding of the problem of identification from noisy data with particular attention to the connections with econometrics, statistics and probability theory.

[ Back ]