Wednesday August 31 – 18.15-19.15 hrs – Aula Magna

	Laurent Praly MINES Paris Tech CAS – Centre Automatique et Systèmes Fontainebleau France

On observers, a meeting of many view points and applications

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Abstract:
Depending on the field of applications, they are called observers or filters or soft sensors or state re-constructors or data assimilation or … But they are all answers to the same problem: given measurements (= partial information), try to estimate internal variables of a dynamical system. For this they incorporate some kind of model of this system and require some kind of a priori information on these internal variables. We shall briefly survey the main approaches to this problem both stochastic and deterministic, and enter more deeply in the technicalities of some of them.

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Laurent Praly biosketch:
Prof. Laurent Praly graduated as an engineer from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris in 1976 and got his PhD in Automatic Control and Mathematics in 1988 from Universite Paris IX Dauphine. After working in industry for three years, in 1980 he joined the Centre Automatique et Systemes at Ecole des Mines de Paris. From July 1984 to June 1985, he spent a sabbatical year as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1985 he has continued at the Centre Automatique et Systemes where he served as director for two years. He has made several long term visits to various institution (Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, Institut Mittag-Leffler, University of Bologna). His main interest is in feedback stabilization of controlled dynamical systems under various aspects — linear and nonlinear, dynamic, output, under constraints, with parametric or dynamic uncertainty, disturbance attenuation or rejection –. On these topics he is contributing both on the theoretical aspect with many academic publications and the practical aspect with applications in power systems, mechanical systems, aerodynamic and space vehicles.