New-ACE

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S1 3JD
http://www.shef.ac.uk/acse/staff/peter_fleming

Professor Peter Fleming is Chair of Industrial Systems and Control in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering and Director of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre for Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK.

His control and systems engineering research interests include control system design, health monitoring, multi-criteria decision-making, optimisation and scheduling, grid computing and real-time control and instrumentation. He has over 350 research publications, including six books, and his research interests have led to the development of close links with a variety of industries in sectors such as aerospace, power generation, food processing, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, a Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control,  former Vice-President of the International Federation of Automatic Control and is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Systems Science.

Design problems arising in control and systems can often be conveniently formulated as multi-criteria decision-making problems. However, these often comprise a relatively large number of criteria. Through close association with designers in industry a range of machine learning tools and associated techniques have been devised to address the special requirements of many-criteria decision-making. These include visualisation and analysis tools to aid the identification of features such as “hot-spots” and non-competing criteria, preference articulation techniques to assist in interrogating the search region of interest and methods to address the special computational demands of these problems. Test problems and real design exercises will demonstrate these approaches.

School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
The Queen's University Belfast,
Ashby Building,
Stranmillis Road
Belfast, BT9 5AH
http://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/ISAC/Profile/?name=g.irwin

Professor George Irwin PhD, DSc, C.Eng, FIEE, FIEEE, FInstMC leads the Intelligent Systems and Control Research group at Queen University Belfast. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Prof Irwin’s research covers identification, monitoring, and control, including neural networks, fuzzy neural systems and multivariate statistics and he has published over 350 research papers and 12 edited books. He is currently working on wireless networked control systems, fault diagnosis of internal combustion engines and novel techniques for fast temperature measurement and was Technical Director of Anex6 Ltd, a University spin out company.
 
He has been awarded a number of prizes for published work including four IEE Premiums, a Best Paper award from the Czech Academy of Sciences and the 2002 Honeywell International Medal from the Institute of Measurement and Control. International recognitions include Honorary/Visiting Professor positions at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shandong University and Shanghai University.

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S1 3JD
http://www.shef.ac.uk/acse/staff/dho

Professor David Owens has been the Head of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering since 1999 and was Dean of Engineering at Sheffield University in the period 2002-2006. He was the Convener of the Deans in the period 2005-06. Prior to this he was Head of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Exeter where he also acted as Chairman of Exeter Enterprises Ltd (the University Technology Transfer Company).

Following 4 years with the UKAEA, he has over 34 years involvement in academic life with experience of departmental teaching, administration and research and high-level University committee service in three UK Universities (Sheffield, Strathclyde and Exeter Universities). He has acted as external examiner for both undergraduate programmes at universities including Glasgow, Bath, Sheffield, Coventry, De Montfort, Salford, Loughborough, KUTKM and UPM-Malaysia.

He has had a strong involvement with the Engineering and related Professions having served on many Committees and the Council of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IET) and currently serves on its Sector Panel for C&I. He is a member and has chaired the Informatics and Control Group of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and has been a member of both the IMechE Research and Standards Board and Technology Strategy Committee.

He was the elected Chairman of the United Kingdom Automatic Control Council from 1999-2002 representing the interests of the UK Professional Institutions within IFAC.

He was also elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008 in recognition of his contributions to control theory and practice and the profession over the past four decades.

In addition he has been elected as a Freeman of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire since 2007 and is listed in A&C Black's Who's Who.

He has served on the Health and Safety Commission´s Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (1995-2006) and has been an independent member of British Energy´s Training Standards and Accreditation Board.

Until 2008, he was an editor of an Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications International Journal, is an Associate Editor of several other journals and regularly contributes to international activities through conference organisation, seminars and invited lectures and committees of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

Advanced Technology
Engineering and Technology
Treforest Campus
University of Glamorgan
Pontypridd, CF37 1DL, UK
http://people.glam.ac.uk/view/1023/

Professor Guoping Liu is a chair of control engineering in the University of Glamorgan in the UK. He received his B.Eng and M.Eng degrees in electrical and electronic engineering from the Central South University of Technology (now the Central South University) in China in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and his Ph.D degree in control engineering from UMIST (now the University of Manchester) in the UK in 1992. He did the postdoctoral research in the University of York in 1992 -1993. He worked as a research fellow in the University of Sheffield in 1994. During 1996-2000, he was a senior engineer in GEC-Alsthom and ALSTOM, and then a principal engineer and a project leader in ABB ALSTOM Power. He was a senior lecturer in the University of Nottingham in 2000-2003. He has been a professor in the University of Glamorgan since 2004, a Hundred-Talents-Programme visiting professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2000, a ChangJiang-Scholar visiting professor of Harbin Institute of Technology since 2008 and a visiting professor of the Central South University since 1994.

Prof Liu has led more than 50 academic research and industrial technology projects, funded by European Framework Programme 6, EPSRC, ESRC, DTI, Technology Strategy Board, Welsh Assembly Government, Higher Education Funding Council, Royal Society, Leverhulme Trust, Energy Saving Trust and more than 20 industrial companies (e.g., Rolls Royce, GEC-Alsthom, ABB-ALSTOM Power, ALSTOM). He has more than 300 publications on control systems and authored or co-authored 6 books. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 1992. He received the best paper prize for applications at the UKACC International Conference on Control in 1998, GuanZhaoZhi best paper prize at the 26^th Chinese Control Conference in 2007, and the best paper prize in automation at the 13^th International Conference on Automation and Computing in 2007. He was the general chair of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control and the program co-chair of the 2008 UKACC International Conference on Control. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Automation and Computing, a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems, a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, and a senior IEEE member. His main research areas include networked control systems, modelling and control of fuel cell vehicles, advanced control of industrial systems, nonlinear system identification and control, and multiobjective optimisation and control.

A feedback control system wherein the control loop is closed through a real-time network is known as a networked control system, which is a completely distributed real-time control system. It allows remote control, monitoring, diagnosis, maintenance and adjustment of networked systems, and collaboration between skilled system experts, managers, engineers and operators situated in geographically diverse locations. With the development of the communication technology and control technology, a global control system is not too far from us now. This talk will cover the following:

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Loughborough University
Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU UK
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/el/staff/goodall.html

Professor Roger Goodall graduated from Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1968.  After working for two years for one of the GEC companies he joined British Rail's R & D Division in Derby, where he was involved in a variety of control-related projects connected with the railway industry.  In 1982 he took up an academic position in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Loughborough University, and is currently Professor of Control Systems Engineering.  His research is concerned with a variety of practical applications of advanced control, usually for high performance electro-mechanical systems. He has had a number of research grants from EPSRC, the EC and industry concerned with active railway vehicle suspensions, advanced data fusion architectures for aerospace applications, and targetted processor architectures for implementation of high-performance controllers. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering as well as both the IET and IMechE. He is also well known internationally for his research in rail vehicle technology and amongst other external activities he is a member of the Executive Committee for the UK Automatic Control Council (the UK's national member organization of  IFAC), and  Vice-President of IFAC for the triennium 2008-2011.

In this talk, the following issues will be discussed
* Why work with industry?
* Personal research collaboration examples
        - BAE Systems, state estimation for aircraft
        - Bombardier Transportation, actively-stabilised "Mechatronic" bogie
* Dos and donts - opportunities and challenges

The Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT)
Queen’s University Belfast
NI Science Park
Belfast BT3 9DT
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/eeecs/Staff/BusinessCard/index.html?name=r.woods

Professor Roger Woods leads the Programmable Systems Laboratory at Queen's University Belfast. His current research interests include the implementation of complex programmable systems for signal processing and telecommunications including design flows and methodologies and applications. Prof Woods serves on the editorial board of IET Proceedings: Computers and Digital Techniques (since 2003), Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems (since 2002), EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing (since 2004). He was general chair of the FPL 2001 and the IEE's FPGA Developer's Forum in 2003 and 2005 and technical program committee co-chair of 2005 IEEE IWVDVT workshop and 2008 Applied Reconfigurable Conference (ARC). He is on the program committee of conferences including SIPS, FCCM, FPL, FPT, ARC and VLSIDAT.

The Hamilton Institute,
National University of Ireland Maynooth
Co. Kildare, Ireland
http://www.hamilton.ie/rick/rick.html
IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Talk

Richard H. (Rick) Middleton was born in Newcastle Australia in 1961. He received his B.Sc. (Physics/Maths) in 1983, and B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering in 1983. He was awarded his Ph.D. (1986) from the University of Newcastle , Australia under the supervision of Professor G.C. Goodwin. Since that time he has held various appointments at the University of Newcastle, currently at the Professor level, and has had visiting appointments for a semester at both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Michigan.

He has published research results in a range of areas including electric machine control, adaptive control, robot control, digital control systems theory using delta operators, multirate and sampled-data systems, performance limitations in feedback control systems (including multivariable and nonlinear systems), metal rolling control problems, robotics, constrained control, and signal processing for condition monitoring of electrical power equipment, control over communications channels. In 1990 he jointly published, with Professor Goodwin the text "Digital Control and Estimation: A Unified Approach" (Prentice-Hall). He has been involved in industrial applications of systems and control to radio astronomy, satellite tracking, metals processing industries, power electronic inverter controls and various applications of Kalman filtering.

He has served as an associate editor of both the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and the IEEE Transaction on Control System Technology. He has also served as Head of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Newcastle,as a panel member and sub panel chair for the Australian Research Council, as Director of the Centre for Integrated Dynamics and Control (A Commonwealth Special Research Centre). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of Engineers Australia, and Vice President Conference Activities of the IEEE Control System Society.

Rick is currently serving as a Research Professor at the Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland, Maynooth in County Kildare, Ireland.

In this talk, I will discuss some of the challenges for control engineering research that are provided by applications in Systems Biology. This research area has some common features with problems that control has had great success in addressing: dynamic behaviour, interconnected systems, mixtures of feedback and feedforward. However, there are also a range of major challenges for control people to work in systems biology: academic culture differences, poorly understood mathematical models, positive/nonlinear/time varying systems. I will use treatment scheduling in HIV as a working example to illustrate some of the challenges, and some preliminary results that have been achieved.

Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics
University of Liverpool
Brownlow Hill
Liverpool L69 3GJ
http://www.liv.ac.uk/eee/academicstaff/wu.htm

Henry Wu obtained an M.Sc.(Eng) degree in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Chinain 1981. From 1981 to 1984. He was appointed Lecturer in Electrical Engineering in the University. He obtained a Ph.D. degree from The Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) in 1987. He worked as a Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow in QUB from 1987 to 1991 and Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Loughborough University, U.K. from 1991 to 1995. He was appointed Chair of Electrical Engineering in 1995, leading the Intelligence Engineering And Automation research group at The University of Liverpool. He is also the Director of the e-Automation Laboratory at Liverpool (http://www.liv.ac.uk/e-automation/). Professor Wu is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of IEE and Senior Member of IEEE. He has served as a committee member of IEE professional groups and on the committees of a number of international conferences, and as an editorial board member of four academic journals. He has given invited lectures at a number of international conferences and institutions.

Professor Wu’s research interests include Nonlinear Adaptive Control, Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computation, Reinforcement Learning, Support Vector Machines, Mathematical Morphology, Biologically Inspired Algorithms and Multi-agent Systems. He has applied these methodologies to various problems of power system operation and control, which include Power Plant Control, Reactive Power Dispatch and Voltage Control, Power System Stability, Machine Parameter Identification, Power System Protection and Renewable Energy. Prof Hu has published over 250 papers in international journals and conference. Over the past eight years, he has undertaken, as a principal or co-investigator, a number of EPSRC funded research projects in the areas of Evolutionary Computation, Learning Systems, Non-linear Adaptive Control and Biocomputation. He has also led a number of industrial projects, sponsored by British Telecom, National Grid Transco, RWE Innogy, AREVA, Siemens, Newborn Appeal and BICC, etc., in the areas of Power System Control and Operation, Medical Intensive Care, Multi-agent Systems and IP Networks for Information Management Condition Monitoring and Control of Distributed Industrial Systems.

This talk is concerned with the development of a new branch of biologically-inspired optimization. It reports the original work on modelling of bacterial foraging behaviours that include chemotaxis, metabolism, proliferation and elimination, and quorum sensing, using an individual based modelling approach. It also reports the novel bacteria-inspired algorithms (BiAs) that are developed, based on the bacterial foraging model. Applications of the BiAs to voltage control and economic dispatch of power systems are included in the talk to demonstrate the potential of BiAs for solving large-scale optimization problems.