July 5, 2007 – The SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory (SIAG/CST) presented its 2007 prize to Murat Arcak at the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications in San Francisco on Sunday, July 1. Following the awards ceremony, Arcak delivered a talk entitled “Structure and Passivity in Networks of Dynamic Systems.”
Arcak, Associate Professor in the Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering Department in the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, was chosen as the recipient of the 2007 SIAG/CST Prize for his fundamental contributions to the study of large networked systems. Arcak received a plaque and a certificate citing his accomplishments in developing a novel passivity approach to largescale networks such as communication, power and biological systems and deriving fundamental results for increasing their robustness and performance.
Currently a visiting scholar at MIT through August 2007, his research interests include nonlinear control, the design and analysis of large-scale systems, and applications of control and estimation. Through his work, he has enhanced performance and robustness for wireless and biological networks, and improved network node and link allocation for the Internet. Arcak’s seminal results in these areas have appeared in Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
Established in 1997, the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory Prize is awarded to a young researcher for outstanding and significant research contributions to mathematical control or systems theory. The contributions must be contained in a paper or papers published in English in peer-reviewed journals. The prize is awarded every three years; the selection committee members for the 2007 Prize included: Fariba Fahroo (Chair), Anthony Bloch, Mary Ann Horn, Thomas Kurtz, and Richard Murray.
SIAM is an international community of over 11,000 individual members, including applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists, and other scientists and engineers. The Society advances these fields by publishing a series of premier journals and a variety of books, and producing a wide selection of conferences. More information about SIAM is available at www.siam.org.