Rafal Goebel, Assistant Professor from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Loyola University Chicago will be honored with the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory (SIAG/CST) Prize. Goebel will be recognized during the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and will present a plenary session at the SIAM Conference on Control & Its Applications. The two conferences will be held jointly in Denver, Colorado, during the first week of July.
Goebel is being honored for his accomplishments in developing novel and fundamental results for in-depth study of hybrid systems and resolving some long-standing issues in these systems such as well-posedness of solutions and robustness of asymptotic stability in hybrid control systems.
The prize will be awarded during the Prizes and Awards Luncheon, Tuesday, July 7, where Goebel will receive a plaque and certificate. His plenary lecture, entitled "Hybrid Inclusions: A Framework for Modeling and Analysis of Hybrid Dynamical Systems" will be held on Monday, July 6.
According to the abstract of the talk, hybrid dynamical systems are systems that combine features of continuous-time dynamical systems and discrete-time dynamical systems. Hybrid inclusions, which combine differential inclusions, difference inclusions, and constraints on motions resulting from the inclusions, provide a broad model of such systems. The lecture will present modeling capabilities of hybrid inclusions and give, under mild assumptions, several elements of asymptotic stability theory for hybrid inclusions. For example, robustness of asymptotic stability, existence of smooth Lyapunov functions, and approximation of a hybrid inclusion in the spirit of linearization will be discussed. The role of set-valued and variational analysis in hybrid inclusions theory will be underlined.
Established in 1997, the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory Prize is awarded to a junior 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 a peer-reviewed journal within the three calendar years preceding the year of the award. The prize is awarded every other year at the biennial SIAM Conference on Control & Its Applications. Selection committee members for the 2009 award are Fariba Fahroo (Chair), Air Force Office of Scientific Research; Murat Arcak, University of California, Berkeley; Michael Demetriou, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Tyrone Duncan, University of Kansas.
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