June 09, 2006 —
Petros Ioannou, Professor of Electrical Engineering, was recently elected as a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for "contributions to the theory of robust adaptive control and applications."
IFAC was founded in September 1957, and is a multinational federation of National Member Organizations (NMOs), each representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control in its own country. The purpose of the Federation is to promote the science and technology of control in the broadest sense, including engineering, physical, biological, social or economic systems, and in both theory and application. IFAC is also concerned with the impact of control technology on society.
Robust adaptive control techniques extend the applicability of traditional adaptive control schemes to retain their stability and performance properties in noisy, uncertain and difficult environments that previously resulted in their failure. Prof. Ioannou has been the main initiator and developer of a large body of complex algorithms and difficult stability and robustness proofs that are unified and presented in a textbook on adaptive control that is used by many Universities world wide. He has applied adaptive control techniques to solve a wide range of problems in areas such as: biology, medicine, intelligent flight control, hypersonic aircraft, ground vehicles, transportation, large flexible structures, congestion control in computer networks, segmented telescopes, and hard disk drives.