Invited Speakers

The following invited speakers will present relevant work in the Control area at the plenary sessions.

Prof. José Carlos Príncipe
Distinguished Professor of ECE
BellSouth Professor
Director Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory
University of Florida
United States of America
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Optimal Kernel Filtering for System Identification

Abstract: This talk will summarize recent advances in nonlinear adaptive filtering. Designing adaptive filters in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS) bridges the established procedures of adaptive filter theory with kernel methods. The end result is a family of filters that are universal approximators in the input space, that have convex performance surfaces (no local minima for large number of samples), and that are on-line, i.e. they adapt with every new sample of the input. Moreover, we will show that contrary to common believe some of its members do not need explicit regularization, e.g. the Kernel Least Mean Squares (KLMS) is well posed in the sense of Hadamard. They are however growing structures therefore special techniques need to be included to curtail their growth. Although the talk will focus on system identification, similar techniques can be applied to the kernel algorithms of machine learning.

Prof. João Miranda Lemos
Leader of the Research Group on Control of Dynamic Systems (INESC)
Instituto Superior Técnico
Portugal
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Distributed Control of Water Delivery Canals

Abstract: Modern engineering often addresses the controller design for situations in which a plant is made of several units scattered in space that interact among them. Networked systems such as the internet, large scale electrical energy distribution grids, water delivery systems or aircraft formations provide examples that are significant due to their socio-economic impact and that rise new scientific challenges in relation to distributed control as well. Distributed control systems such as the ones mentioned consist of various control agents that are connected to the various subsystems that compose the overall plant to control. Since decisions taken on the basis of a pure local basis can be in conflict with each other and lead to an unstable behavior of the overall plant, the local control agents exchange information with some of their neighbors in order to act in a coordinated way so as to achieve a sub-optimal global performance. This talk addresses the design of LQG and model Predictive control (MPC) distributed controllers. Several methods, including procedures based on dual optimization and game theory, will be reviewed and an example of application to a real water delivery canal is presented.

Prof. José Alberto Fonseca
Research Director at Micro I/O
Universidade de Aveiro
Portugal
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Real-Time Communications: from Fieldbuses and Industrial Automation to Wireless and Vehicular Applications

Abstract: Embedded systems have evolved from centralized to distributed architectures, with communications playing a fundamental role. This trend has begun in avionics, followed by industrial and building automation and automotive applications. Distributed Embedded Systems (DES) are, in consequence, often deployed over resource-constrained devices and subject to real-time and dependability constraints. Special purpose communication protocols, called fieldbuses, have been developed.
This talk will firstly review several research results concerning solutions to achieve dependable behavior and real-time communication in fieldbuses operating in dynamic environments. Particularly, it will be reported the work with CAN (Controller Area Network) which is still now the dominant standard in embedded automotive electronics.
Recent evolutions in this field led to the use of Ethernet as a fieldbus. A short discussion on this, together with some research results that inherited the knowledge from CAN, will also be presented.
Even if cabled communications are still widely used, the evolution of wireless communications opens the doors for their use in dependable DES. However, wireless systems operate, in general, in open environments, posing new challenges to safety critical applications. The talk will also address some recent results concerning the design of deterministic communications in open environments, namely for the 802.11 and 802.15.4 standards in the 2.4GHz ISM band.
Finally a report on recent developments at the Instituto de Telecomunicações related with the emerging WAVE (Wireless Access to Vehicular Environments) standard will be presented which include transceivers for the 5.9GHz 802.11p standard and the building up of safety services on top of that standard.

Prof. Luís Rodrigues
Associate Professor
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Concordia University
Canada
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Networked Control Systems: a Wireless Multirate Perspective

Abstract: Networked control systems have been pervasive in several applications during the last 10-20 years. In dealing with networked control systems it is important to have methods that are capable to guarantee stability in the presence of time varying delays. Since several applications consist of fusing information from sensors that provide data at different rates, a multirate perspective is also important when addressing networked control systems.
This talk focuses on networked systems with multirate sensors and feedback loops. It will be shown that sufficient stability conditions for such systems in the presence of time varying delays can be cast as a set of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) provided the plant is assumed to be linear. LMIs can be solved very efficiently from both a theoretical and a practical point of view.
Sampled data control of networked systems will be analyzed as a special case. Applications to fly-by-wireless control of aerospace systems will be shown.