IEEE Control Systems Award

I am deeply honoured and humbled to receive this award. I do not want to take up too much of your time but I have been asked to make some brief remarks.

I guess some may think of an award of this type as an “arrival”. However, to me, life is a journey not an arrival. So, in that vein, I would like to tell you a little about my journey.

My journey began in Broken Hill, a small mining town in the Australian desert.

As a young man I had two ambitions

•     Go to a place that had sealed roads, and

•     Live by the ocean where the summer temperatures were less than 120oF

I managed to realize both these life goals in 1962 when I went to Sydney to study engineering at the University of New South Wales.

Actually a third fantastic thing happened to me in Sydney. On July 7, 1962 I went to the Jazz Club in the city of Sydney. There I met this beautiful young girl who has been by my side ever since. My dear wife Rosslyn is my guide and my strength. Actually, I owe everything to her including two wonderful children and three fabulous grandchildren.

Continuing the journey, (now with Rosslyn), we packed a small box in 1970 and headed off to London. It seemed like a big risk for a boy from the desert. However, my advice to young people is to take risks in life. It is only by taking risks that big opportunities are realized.

In London, I had the opportunity to interact with some truly fabulous people including John Westcott, Roger Sargent, Karl Aström, Martin Clark, Mark Davis and Richard Vinter. Their work continues to inspire me to this very day!

Then there was, of course, David Mayne. We became firm friends and have continued to work together for the past 35 years. He has been a constant source of scholarly advice and inspiration. David is too modest to sing his own praise, so let me do it for him. A truly fabulous person!

Let me return to the idea of taking risks. David Mayne and I actually rode motorbikes back to my old home in Broken Hill. 4,000 kms of risk and fun! They say “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Well, clearly the motorbikes didn’t kill David or myself so I guess I can claim credit for making David stronger.

In 1974, I decided to leave London to return to Australia. Here I realized some further life goals. Firstly I was able to live by the ocean away from summer heat. However, more importantly, I was able to join the vibrant new group being established by Brian Anderson at the University of Newcastle.

Brian was the youngest professor ever appointed in Australia. He was hard working, enthusiastic, inspiring and, above all supremely organized. If Brian says that a meeting is scheduled from 9 to 10 am, then you can be certain the meeting will not be running at 10:05. I guess that is another lesson for young people. If something cannot be said succinctly, then it probably shouldn’t be said.

We were actually a very small group in Newcastle and this provided the opportunity to work on a broad spectrum of topics ranging from industrial electronics to radar, telecommunication, signal processing and even a little control theory. We also had a wonderful corporate spirit. Each supported others. I fondly remember working with John Moore, Tony Cantoni, Rob Evans and many others on a diverse range of topics.

Indeed, I believe that one of the great things about our field is that it intersects deep theory with a broad range of real world applications. Personally I find nothing more exciting than seeing some idea that I have worked on used in the real world. Many colleagues in industry helped me realize this goal. I particular want to single out John Edwards of Hatch-IAS who inspired me for over 30 years with rolling mill automation challenges.

This leads me to make another suggestion to young people; always think broadly and avoid becoming delta function researchers.

During the early years in Newcastle, I took the opportunity of a study leave at Harvard University. There I worked with Peter Ramadge and Peter Caines on Adaptive Control. To be honest we were all very new to this field and had little idea what we should do. Indeed, we almost gave up hundreds of times. However, with persistence, brilliant ideas from the two Peter’s and amazing insights gained through reading recent results by Vic Solo, we finally saw light at the end of the tunnel.

Many of the world experts on Adaptive Control at that time were working at Yale, so we jumped on a train to proudly show them our results. This led to an amazing exchange with Steve Morse. He simply said “I do no believe it, you must be wrong!” Can I quickly add that Steve did this in an incredibly scholarly fashion. Indeed, once convinced, Steve became our greatest advocate and continues to be so.

So my advice to young people is to always welcome criticism. It can be the most positive influence you will ever have!

Returning to Newcastle. I worked with wonderful colleagues and students. It is a great joy to me to see that they have all excelled in different fields. There are too many to mention here but a short list includes Juan Carlos Agüero, Thomas Brinsmead, Milan Derpich, Jose de Doná, Christian Lovaas, Brett Ninness, Daniel Quevedo, Osvaldo Rojas, Mario Salgado, María Seron, Edwardo Silva, Steve Weller, James Welsh, Juan Yuz and many others. It is actually their combined work that this award is built upon.

I even managed to write several books with my former students. I always underestimated the effort involved (perhaps that was simply a trick to encourage my joint authors not to give up). I remember saying to Mario Salgado, it will just take 300 hours. He often reminds me that it was more like 10,000 hours! The truly amazing fact about all my joint book authors is that we remain friends after all the anguish of book writing.

Maybe the kind of work we all do in our field is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I thus also want to mention the incredibly hard work that my colleagues have put into our research centre in Newcastle over the past decade or so. I especially want to mention my colleagues Reza Mohemani, Minyue Fu and Gregory Adams who made many personal sacrifices to support our joint research work.

I want to conclude by singling out several other people who had a major influence on me.

Firstly, there are Dianne Piefke and Jayne Disney who have managed the financial and administrative side of our research for many years. Their friendly approach and remarkable efficiency has been a key element in our success and is very well known to a large team of academic visitors who have come to Newcastle.

Secondly, there was Stefan Graebe. He is a wonderful systems researcher but also possesses fabulous people skills. Every Friday night he would come to my office with two packets of chile crisps and two cans of cola to discuss the discoveries of the week. Stefan had this incredible ability to focus on what is important. He would say, “you have 3 minutes to explain X.” This was yet another version of the edict that “if it cannot be said succinctly then don’t say it”. Although Stefan had no formal training in finance, he rose to the position of Chief Financial Officer in a major company. So another message for young people is to take on hard jobs, the systems approach and clarity of thinking will see you through.

I also want to mention Rick Middleton. We first met about 25 years ago and have been friends and colleagues ever since. He taught me all about delta operators and how to support and respect others. I know of no nicer person. You are fortunate indeed that he will be the next President of the Control Systems Society.

Next, I want to mention Arie Feuer. He has visited me every year in Newcastle for 20 years. Arie is a firm believer in the value of multidisciplinary research. He has spent 20 years convincing me that Control has much to offer Signal Processing and vice versa. I am a slow learner but I am gradually getting there. By the way, I also made Arie stronger since he also braved a motorbike trip to Broken Hill and survived.

I want to conclude by mentioning others who have been part of my journey, including Lennart Ljung, Torsten Soderström, Michel Gevers, Bill Levine and Julio Braslavsky. All taught me deep secrets of systems science but, perhaps more importantly, the value of friendship.

Well, I guess if I keep naming people who have inspired me, I will end up naming the whole Control Systems Society. So I think I must stop here.

Again, this is a truly great honour. I look forward to continuing this incredible journey with you all.

Thank you!

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.  By now it has become a tradition for the recipient of the Field Award to share with the community his past experiences, views on where the subject is going, and future prospects.  Over the next 7 or 8 minutes, I too would like to continue this tradition by making a few remarks that are partly autobiographical and partly philosophical.

About forty years ago Andy Warhol said that “In future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.”  This is my fifteen minutes of fame, but what with inflation and all that, my fifteen minutes have shrunk to eight minutes.

My first comment is: It is essential to have role models.  While I have been influenced by several distinguished researchers during my adult life, undoubtedly my first role model was my father, who was a professor of mathematics.  I was about eight years old when I first began to notice that our house in the South Indian city of Tirupati was always full of my father’s college students, who were constantly discussing what my father called “the subject.”  I asked him what they were doing and he said “Oh, we are trying to find ‘results.’”  I asked him what a “result” was and he said “Well, it is something new.”  Within a few days I got my own first “result”, namely: If you square a number, and multiply the two numbers on either side, the difference is always one.  Or in modern algebraic notation, (n+1)(n-1) = n^2-1.  When I showed this to my father, he said “Well, a result is not something that you did not know before, it is something nobody knew before.”  My first reaction was to be amazed that any human being could possibly find out something that nobody knew before, but my next reaction was that if he could do it, then I was also going to do the same thing – I was going to become a researcher and find lots of “results.”  It was exactly the kind of thing a silly little kid would think, but it definitely did set me on the path to being a researcher.

At a time when many young people seem to be so confused about what they want to do, it was really a blessing for me to know so early in life exactly what I wanted to be, even if I had no idea how to go about it.  My father was a most remarkable researcher.  He published his first paper at the age of 21, and when he passed away at the age of 84, he had five or six papers under review.  Mathematics is supposed to be a young person’s game, and I can’t think of anyone else who published steadily for more than sixty years.  I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge my debt to my father.

My second comment is: Don’t rule out the role of chance in life.  Modern man suffers from the hubris that he can control nature, and therefore life is deterministic.  But random events and arbitrary choices have unpredictable consequences.  In my case, when I was finishing up my Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, I was pretty clear in my mind what I was going to do for my Master’s and Ph.D.  I was simply fascinated by passive network synthesis, the relationship between positive real functions and energy dissipation, and such topics.  So I had decided to study circuit theory for my graduate degrees.  Now by the time I reached the final semester of my undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin, to graduate all I had to do was to take six elective courses in anything at all.  So I chose six electrical engineering courses, which, as you can imagine, all met on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  So the result was that I had classes solidly from 9:30 until 3:30 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and no time for lunch.  After doing this for one week, I realized that I wasn’t going to survive the semester with this kind of schedule.  So I dropped my lunchtime course and looked for a course that met on Tuesday and Thursday.  The only course I could find was an introductory control systems course.  Believe me, that was the only reason I signed up for that course, not any interest in control theory.  But somehow this chance deviation into the controls course had quite unforeseen consequences, as you can all see.

My third point is: If you aspire to success, you must work on entire areas, not just individual research problems.  I got this advice from the late George Zames, back in 1975, and it really changed the way I do research.  Until then I was like a gun-slinger, working on whatever problems caught my fancy, with no particular theme or coherence to my work.  But after I got this advice from George, I consciously tried to work on entire areas, and it has definitely paid off in terms of the impact I have had on the field.

My fourth point is: Don’t be afraid to change research areas often.  Changing areas requires a lot of courage, because you get pushed out of your comfort zone.  But it has its own rewards.  A related point is: When you do move into a new area, work out everything for yourself from scratch, and don’t always believe everything you read.  This is the reason why I like to write a lot of books.  It’s only when you start writing a book that you realize just how poorly you understand the subject.  Writing a book forces you to develop a holistic view of the subject.  The benefit is that if you do even a halfway decent job of explaining a particular subject, then pretty soon everyone begins to look at things your way.

In this connection I would like to acknowledge my debt to Charlie Desoer.  When he invited me to join him and finish up our book on feedback systems, I was just 25 years old.  It was his generosity that made him reach out to such a kid on such an important project.  Working on that book made me realize the importance of making it easy for the reader to dip in and out of a book.  Even thirty years ago, most people did not have the time to read a book in its entirety.  They just want to look up something very specific, and the author has to facilitate that.  I have consciously tried to make my books highly “modular” and I think this has caused them to be pretty popular.

Now here is the last and final point: The family comes first and foremost.  Shakunthala and I have been married now for thirty six years, and without doubt I could not have achieved what little I did without her support over the years.  Everyone who knows her is extremely fond of her, and indeed some of our relatives who come to Hyderabad stay with us, even if they have their own houses in the city.  That’s how affectionate and universally well-loved she is.  While our daughter Aparna was growing up, I always tried to be there when she needed me.  In fact I would wait until she went off to sleep at 9 PM or so, and then start my “second shift” as I used to call it.  Now she’s not “my little baby” anymore, and is going to get her own Ph.D. very shortly.

Let me conclude with a little attempt at crystal ball-gazing.  What is the future of control theory and its applications?  I believe the strength of control theory derives from two aspects: First, as engineers we are problem-driven, and not technique-driven.  Second, we know bits and pieces of lots of branches of mathematics, which is the queen of all science to quote Gauss.  Because of these two factors, we are able to look at each problem on its own merits, instead of forcing it to fit into a preconceived formalism.  To illustrate just how widely applicable control theory really is, note that controls people are branching out into all sorts of areas like communications, mathematical finance, and even biology, but we don’t see people from those areas moving into control!  In short, control theory is a “great place to be from” and I don’t see that changing in future.  Fads may come and fads may go, but control theory will go on forever, because of its ability to adapt itself constantly.

When I was doing my Ph.D., the whole new vista of mathematical control theory was just opening up.  Now, with all the doom and gloom of the financial meltdown all around us, paradoxically I think the current generation of young control theorists has at least two exciting opportunities, namely in mathematical finance, and in “in silico” drug discovery.  I would like to describe, extremely briefly, these two opportunities.

I really think that we control theorists can play an important role in mathematical finance; indeed, we have already been doing it for the past decade and a half.  Again to over-simplify grossly, I view option pricing as computing an expected value, and hedging as stochastic control.  But the spectacular failure of all the pricing and hedging models, which is at the core of the financial meltdown, shows that it is necessary to incorporate human behavior into the models.  The volatility of an asset, which is a key parameter in mathematical finance, is not a natural constant like the Young’s modulus of steel; rather, the volatility is what everyone thinks it is at a given point in time!  Suppose everyone in the market place uses the same “incorrect” formula to compute the price of an asset-based derivative.  Then will the formula gradually become “correct” over time, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?  What we really need is a new approach that may be called “flocking theory meets Black-Scholes”!

The current situation in drug discovery reminds me of VLSI synthesis about 30 years ago.  Back then, “yields” in chip fabrication were about 3% to 5%, and every single fabrication facility had its own in-house design team.  Over the past three decades, we have moved towards “virtual foundries” that can design a VLSI system purely using CAD tools, and design is now decoupled from fabrication.  Interestingly, the “yield” on drug molecules is now between 1.5% to 2%, or about the same as for VLSI thirty years ago.  But I see the emergence of “virtual” drug discovery companies, and indeed one of my research groups is working on precisely this area.  Of course, the human body is a lot more complex than an inanimate silicon wafer, but I really do believe that by bringing the rigor of the “systems approach” to problems of drug discovery, we can make substantial contributions.

In conclusion, I feel privileged to join the ranks of the previous winners, many of whom are all-time greats of control theory.  I wish everyone in the room the same success I have had if not very much more.  Thank you and good night!

Dear Colleagues,

It is an honor and simultaneously a humbling event to be in front of such a distinguished audience today. Occasions such as this are rare, and present an opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of others. This is especially necessary in my case, since my career has largely been a series of happy accidents, of standing on the shoulders of many giants.

My technical career began, as is probably true for most of us, with my mother. She succeeded in schooling three children, even though my father was a geologist, living in tents, moving every week or so, walking about 17 miles each day Geiger counter in hand, and being allowed to return home only for a few months each year during the monsoon season. I also benefited from the care of my grandfather, a person of infinite wisdom. Later, I was fortunate to rub shoulders with some of the brightest students from the country at IIT Madras. Ultimately what rubbed off though was a sense of their high standards, and the lifelong calibration that results from having known people of the highest quality.

It was an accident that brought me to the US. One of my table tennis partners sent me an application form from some place called Washington University, for some program, called Control Systems Science and Engineering. I decided to go there only after I calculated that, in the US, I could actually obtain an MS in nine months, and then return to resume my carefully laid plans for a management career, all within the span of a year. Such indeed are the plans of men and mice!

At Washington University I was a beneficiary of the far-reaching systems vision of John Zaborszky, and of his generosity in allowing us to work with anyone we chose, which in my case was Jan van Schuppen. Those were however the days following the great Boeing layoff, and with an utterly mediocre thesis to boot, I was grateful to receive exactly one job offer, from the Mathematics Department at the Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County. There, I benefited greatly from the discipline of mathematics, and from interacting with top-notch analysts such as Tom Seidman.

Ladies and gentlemen, many of you will agree with me when I say that we in this room are very fortunate and truly lead very envious lives. To quote Longfellow, not only do we get to savor:

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,

And all the sweet serenity of books.”

but, as if that were not enough, we are in the thick of a heady technological revolution, where nothing seems to be really impossible or undreamable. The times, ladies and gentlemen, as Dylan said, are a changing.

But more than technology and books, what I especially treasure is that over the years I have been fortunate to actually meet a number of great people. One who comes to mind is the incomparable Pravin Varaiya. I have been privileged to have countless hours of conversations indulged in walks all over the world, freely moving between systems theory, economics and politics, and other things under the sun, and his deep perception has educated me beyond my Ph.D. and given me much food for thought.

Over the past three decades, I have also been inspired by another man of letters, Sanjoy Mitter. He has served as an oasis of calm in a frenzied research world, and a connoisseur of systems research. It is because of him that visiting MIT has always been the emotional equivalent of coming home to discuss what you are thinking of, with someone who understands you.

Yet another person of indefatigable energy and positivity, one whose energy level is hard to keep up with, is Karl Astrom. His broad minded appreciation of ideas while being the most practically effective of engineers, his directness of purpose, infectious enthusiasm, incredible depth of knowledge and experience for all things control, has been a great source of positive feedback for me.

It was a fortuitous coincidence that brought me to Illinois. At the podium after my talk at the 1983 CDC in San Antonio, Petar Kokotovic asked me what I wanted were I to move to Illinois, to which my complete reply was, “The usual things.” That was it. When I returned from an overseas trip five or six weeks later there was a job offer for me at Illinois, sans list of references, sans vita, and even sans interview. To this day, I continue to believe that my job at Illinois is completely illegal. I have been inspired by watching his lifelong attention to the lifelong careers of students and colleagues, his careful nurture of scientific ideas, his infinite subtlety, his unsurpassed leadership of institutions, and his ability to make wherever he is the Mecca of control. We have shared many a passionate and free ranging discussion on things political, literary, and scientific.

Indeed I have been truly fortunate in meeting many a kindred soul and great mind. Victor Solo, Marco Campi, John Tsitsiklis, Venkat Ananthram, Jean Walrand, Laurent Praly, Carlos Humes, Vivek Borkar, John Baillieul, Tyrone Duncan, Hector Sussmann, Liang-Liang Xie, Mike Harrison, Peter Caines, Massimo Franceschetti, Graham Goodwin, Steve Morse, Kameshwar Poolla, Bob Gallager, Steve Marcus, John Baras, Harold Kushner, Ray Rishel. The names are too numerous to mention. Then there are my graduate students, whose presence has inspired and rejuvenated me.

Places make people, and I am fortunate to be a member of the Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois, my second home away from home. It is the best research environment in the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this award belongs as much to my dear wife Jaya, as to me. She has been my soulmate for the past quarter century. She has been the source of my positive feedback. I have been blessed with her and our two proudest creations, our children Ashwin and Shilpa. It is not only poets who have muses, researchers do too, and she is mine. I dedicate this award to her, and to our two children Ashwin and Shilpa.

Thank you for this honor.