Seminar - Professor Li Qiu

We propose a communication/control co-design paradigm to study networked control systems. The essence of this new paradigm is to allow the communication network to be jointly designed with the controller design. In this talk, two different communication/control co-design approaches would be discussed, i.e., the channel/controller co-design and coding/control co-design. In the channel/controller co- design, we find the minimum total channel capacity required for stabilizability given in terms of the topological entropy of the plant. In the coding/control co-design, the MIMO technology recently developed in communication theory has been utilized for information exchange. A necessary and sufficient condition for the networked stabilizability is obtained given in terms of a majorization relation.

Li Qiu received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto in 1990. After briefly working in the Canadian Space Agency, the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences (Waterloo), and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (Minneapolis), he joined Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1993, where he is now a Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering.

Prof. Qiu's research interests include system, control, information theory, and mathematics for information technology, as well as their applications in manufacturing industry and energy systems. He is also interested in control education and coauthored an undergraduate textbook "Introduction to Feedback Control" which was published by Prentice-Hall in 2009. This book has so far had its North American edition, International edition, and Indian edition. The Chinese Mainland edition is to appear soon. He served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and an associate editor of Automatica. He was the general chair of the 7th Asian Control Conference, which was held in Hong Kong in 2009. He was a Distinguished Lecturer from 2007 to 2010 and is a member of the Board of Governors in 2012 of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is the founding chairperson of the Hong Kong Automatic Control Association, serving the term 2014-2017. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of IFAC.