Travel Grant: 2022 IEEE CSS Workshop on Control for Societal-Scale Challenges

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support a conference for the development of a roadmap for the control community that identifies societal-scale challenges and research paths for addressing them. The roadmap will seek to identify key societal drivers, emerging technological trends, and outline methodologies that squarely address the fundamental challenges by embracing these drivers and leveraging advances in enabling technologies. By doing so, the conference will underscore scientific challenges that the community should pursue, and investigate workforce education and training curricula, with the grand goal of a solid impact by our community on the societal-scale challenges. The funding will be used for travel support for attendees from the United States to participate in the conference and contribute to these deliberations. The 2022 IEEE CSS Workshop on Control for Societal-Scale Challenges (CSS-CSC) is planned to be a decennial event organized by the global control community. The 2022 IEEE CSS Workshop on Control for Societal-Scale Challenges will be an in-person event and will be held in Stockholm, Sweden, June 17-18, 2022. This is intended to be the first of a decennial series of such events, and will be cosponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society. The main goal of this workshop is to produce a scientific roadmap for the future of our discipline, Control for Societal-Scale Challenges: Roadmap 2030. This roadmap will include themes such as climate change, sharing economy, public health, neuro-engineering, robotics and automation, cyber-physical human systems, smart societies, 6G networks, and Artificial Intelligence. The CSS-CSC workshop is being organized by an international committee of scientific excellence, leaders in the control community. Many of the attendees are of equally well-known stature, if not even more so, and have made seminal contributions to the community over the last four decades. This workshop will contribute to the fundamental goal of identifying, underscoring, and advancing potential contributions from the control community for addressing societal-scale challenges that are emerging in the 21st century. This conference is expected to pave the way for a series of such events, with a similar large scope, to occur once every decade. The entire focus of this workshop is in achieving a broader impact on all walks of society including energy, transportation, healthcare, robotics, manufacturing, and overall quality of life. The technologies, the challenges, the opportunities, the methodologies, the tools, the validation testbeds, education, training and retraining of workforce, are the key elements that will be explored in the conference. All in all, every aspect of the proposed conference is intended to achieve a broader impact on the scientific community, and in fact the entire society, as we advance into the 21st century. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.