Dr Zhong-Ping Jiang

Feedback is ubiquitous in man-made and natural systems and is vital for the functioning of many systems in engineering and the life sciences. This talk will begin with a review of the crucial role played by feedback in the early development of control theory and practice. Then, I will outline some challenges arising from various application areas of network science, ranging from transportation systems, smart grid, telecommunication networks to unmanned vehicle systems, to name a few. Due to the sheer size and complexity of these dynamic networks, tools for stability analysis and controller design are desperately needed. Restricted exchange of information and the presence of communication constraints prevent conventional feedback control theory from being applied directly. In this talk, I will draw some observations from my work with co-workers on various projects in ship control, networked control systems, Internet congestion control, systems physiology, and smart grid. Time permitting, I will discuss some of our recent work on quantized control for nonlinear systems and distributed control design for autonomous multi-agent systems with a fixed structure or with time-variable topology.

Biography: Zhong-Ping JIANG (M’94, SM’02, F’08) received the B.Sc. degree in mathematics from the University of Wuhan, Wuhan, China, in 1988, the M.Sc. degree in statistics from the University of Paris XI, France, in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree in automatic control and mathematics from the Ecole des Mines de Paris, France, in 1993.
Currently, he is a Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and an affiliated Changjiang Chair Professor at Beijing University. His main research interests include stability theory, robust and adaptive nonlinear control, adaptive dynamic programming and their applications to underactuated mechanical systems, communication networks, multi-agent systems, smart grid and systems physiology. He is coauthor of the book Stability and Stabilization of Nonlinear Systems (with Dr. I. Karafyllis, Springer 2011).
An IEEE Fellow, Dr. Jiang is a Subject Editor for the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control and has served as an Associate Editor for several journals including Mathematics of Control, Signals and Systems (MCSS), Systems & Control Letters, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, European Journal of Control and J. Control Theory and Applications. Dr. Jiang is a recipient of the prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship Award from the Australian Research Council, the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Young Investigator Award from the NSF of China. He received the Best Theory Paper Award (with Y. Wang) at the 2008 World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation, and with T. Liu and D.J. Hill, the Guan Zhao Zhi Best Paper Award at the 2011 Chinese Control Conference.

Dr Zhong-Ping Jiang

Biography: