Student Travel Support for the 2009 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. To be held in Shanghai, China, on December 16-18, 2009.

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal requests support for student travel to the 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Shanghai, China, December 16-18, 2009. In the pages that follow, it is argued that the proposed use of NSF funds has substantial INTELLECTUAL MERIT and will have a positive BROADER IMPACT on our technical community and the field at large. INTELLECTUAL MERIT: It is increasingly evident that current research on many technological frontiers is heavily influenced by foundational ideas from control and system theory. This research is creating advances in such diverse applications domains as communications and manufacturing networks, finance and risk management, cooperative control of systems of multiple autonomous agents, and systems biology. The IEEE CDC is the premier annual international conference on systems and automatic control research. The 48th CDC now has an expected level of participation over 1700. The overarching intellectual merit of the proposed use of funds is that graduate students will see firsthand how the foundations of control and systems are evolving and shaping the frontiers of research in many applications domains. BROADER IMPACT: With around 1500 reseach presentations, including several plenary lectures, numerous tutorial presentations, workshops and exhibits the CDC provides attendees with exposure to the state-of-the-art in emerging areas of control research and technology. The broader impact of this travel support is that it will help train the next generation of control researchers and practitioners. The future security and well-being of the United States relies on maintaining pools of trained scientists and engineers in critical areas such as control technology. The students to be supported under the proposed project represent the future technological leaders of the IEEE Control Systems Society, which is the world?s leading professional organization in the discipline.