invited speakers

P. R. Kumar

P. R. Kumar obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from I.I.T. Madras, and D.Sc. degree in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis. From 1977-84 he was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Since 1985 he has been at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants, information theory, wireless networks, sensor networks, and networked control systems. He has received the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the IEEE Field Award in Control Systems, the Fred W. Ellersick Prize of the IEEE Communications Society, is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate by ETH, Zurich.

Communication and Control in the Next Generation of Systems

In the field of communications, wireless networks are potentially on the cusp of a take-off. The field of control is similarly at the cusp of a third generation of control systems - networked control - where control loops are closed over networks. These fields are expected to play an important role, since the twenty-first century could well be the era of large scale systems building, as we seek to address societal problems in areas such as transportation, energy, resource management, and health systems. We present some recent advances in the fields of communications and control.