Lecture Series
The Control of Complex Systems Lecture Series brought prominent speakers from controls and related disciplines to PNNL to share the latest information and advances from industry, national laboratories, and academia.
Dr. F.L. Lewis
Moncrief-O'Donnell Endowed Chair
University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute (UTARI)
Friday, April 20, 2018
Noon
EMSL Auditorium
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Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Feedback Control and Differential Graphical Games: Applications to Robotics and Distributed Energy Microgrids
Biography
Dr. F.L. Lewis, of the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), is an award-winning scholar, technical expert, inventor, author and speaker. Dr. Lewis serves as the Moncrief-O'Donnell Endowed Chair at the UTA Research Institute, a research and development unit that applies cutting edge technologies to real-world engineering problems. At UTA he's also a distinguished scholar professor, distinguished teaching professor, and head of the Advanced Controls and Sensors Group. Dr. Lewis’ work is focused in feedback control, reinforcement learning, intelligent systems, and distributed control systems.
Dr. Lewis has received national and international recognition. He is a member of the National Academy of Inventors, is a Fellow in IEEE, IFAC, the U.K. Institute of Measurement and Control and AAAS, and has won a number of prestigious awards. He has authored seven U.S. patents, nearly 400 journal papers and more than 400 conference papers, plus multiple books, chapters and journal special issues. His H-index is 97. In addition to his work at UTA, Dr. Lewis serves as the Qian Ren Thousand Talents Consulting Professor at Northeastern University in Shenyang, China.
Dr. Lewis earned his bachelor's degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering and his master's degree in Electrical Engineering at Rice University. He also holds a master's degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of West Florida, and a doctorate from Georgia Tech.
Dr. Christos G. Cassandras
Distinguished Professor of Engineering
Boston University
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Noon
EMSL Auditorium
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"Complexity Made Simple*"
*At a Small Price
Biography
Christos G. Cassandras, an award-winning scholar, technical expert, author and speaker, serves as Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University and is a co-founder of the university’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering. He also holds a chair professorship at Tsinghua University, China. Dr. Cassandras specializes in discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. In addition to academics, he has worked extensively with industry on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. Dr. Cassandras is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC. He has published approximately 400 refereed papers and six books, has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and currently is an Automatica editor. He has been a featured speaker at prestigious professional society meetings, including the American Control Conference, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, and the IFAC World Congress. Dr. Cassandras holds degrees from Yale University (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982).
John D. McDonald, P.E.
Smart Grid Business Development Leader
GE Grid Solutions
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Noon
EMSL Auditorium
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"Grid Modernization–Technological Advancements Beyond Smart Grid"
Biography
Mr. McDonald is an award-winning industry leader, technical expert, educator, and speaker who currently serves as the Smart Grid Business Development Leader for GE Power's Grid Solutions business. He possesses more than four decades of experience in the electric utility industry. Mr. McDonald served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Standards Association, chaired the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel's Governing Board (2010-2015) and is a member of the NIST Smart Grid Advisory Committee. He has provided leadership to numerous national professional and academic societies and committees, including serving as President of the IEEE Power & Energy Society and on the IEEE Board of Directors. Mr. McDonald holds B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. (Power Engineering) degrees from Purdue University, and an M.B.A. (Finance) degree from the University of California-Berkeley. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and has won numerous awards and recognition for his contributions to the electric industry. He has published 80 articles and papers and co-authored four books.
Dr. Richard M. Murray
California Institute of Technology
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
12:30 p.m.
Battelle Auditorium
"Specification and Synthesis of Complex, Networked Control Systems with Applications in Physical, Biological and Computational Sciences"
Biography
Richard M. Murray received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1985 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (2013). Dr. Murray's research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in autonomy and synthetic biology. Current projects include specification, verification and synthesis of networked control systems; analysis and design of biomolecular feedback circuits; and novel architectures for control using slow computing.