There are four special sessions for MECC 2021:


    Industry-Led Research Roadmap Panel on Control Engineering in the Age of AI, 12:55-14:00 PM Monday, Oct. 25, 2021.
    More details here.

    Moderators: Dr. Soumik Sarkar, Iowa State University
    Abstract: The theme of this panel discussion will be "Control Engineering in the Age of AI", where we will explore the role of modeling, estimation and control theory researchers in advancing AI capabilities, what we can contribute to the AI and Machine Learning (ML) disciplines and what we can learn and adopt from these areas to make progress in our research community.
    Format: This will be an open discussion panel with some anchoring questions posed by the moderators which will also be shared with the panelists ahead of time. The goal is to have a more organic conversation emerging from these anchoring questions. We may allow a few follow up questions from the audience through zoom chat. In addition to this, we may optionally allow the panelists to share one or two introductory slides to introduce themselves and their respective organizations in the context of this panel.
    Short biographies of the panelists:
    Mouhacine Benosman is a Senior Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambdrige, USA. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France. Before joining MERL he worked at Reims University, France, Strathclyde University, Scotland, and National University of Singapore. His research interests include: multi-agent distributed control with applications to robotics and smart-grid systems, control of infinite dimensional systems with applications to fluid dynamics, learning and adaptive control, dynamical system theory for robust reinforcement learning, and control-theory based optimization algorithms with application to machine learning. He is Associate Editor of IEEE Control Systems Letters, Associate Editor of the Journal of Opt. Theory and Applications, and Senior Editor of the Inter. Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing.
    Amit Surana is a Technical Fellow at Raytheon Technologies Research Center (formerly known as United Technologies Research Center (UTRC)) where he drives research and development in the areas of dynamics and controls, machine learning and collaborative autonomy, with a broad range of aerospace and defense applications. He has won several awards including Padmakar P. Lele Outstanding Research and Thesis award for his PhD Thesis at MIT, Technical Excellence Award at UTRC, and Grainger Grant from the Grainger Foundation and National Academy of Engineering. He has published 22 journal papers, 50 peer reviewed conference papers, and has 4 patents granted and 8 patents pending. Amit received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2000, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.A. in Mathematics both from Pennsylvania State University in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2007.
    Draguna Vrabie is a chief data scientist in the Data Sciences and Machine Intelligence Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She serves as Team Lead for the Autonomous Learning and Reasoning Team. At the intersection of control system theory and machine learning, her work is on the design of adaptive decision and control systems. Her current focus is on deep learning methodologies and algorithms for high-performance cyber-physical systems. Before joining PNNL in 2015, she was a senior scientist at United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, Connecticut. Vrabie holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and an ME and BE in automatic control and computer engineering from Gheorghe Asachi Technical University, Iaşi, Romania.
    Ankur Ganguli is an Executive Director of Vehicle Motion Embedded Controls at General Motors. She is responsible for defining direction and managing execution of design, development, integration, and release of all vehicle motion embedded controls across GM’s portfolio. Prior to GM, she was at Eaton corporation where she was the Global Engineering Manager of Software & Controls Center of Excellence. She received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2003.
    Alberto Speranzon is a Technical Fellow within Honeywell Aerospace Advanced Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden in 2006. In September 2015 Alberto joined Honeywell where he is working on various aspects of autonomous systems for urban air mobility, leading such research areas as a program manager and principal investigator. Before joining Honeywell, he was a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center (now Raytheon Technologies Research Center), where he covered various roles of increasing responsibility. Alberto served as PI and Co-PI of various government-sponsored projects (DARPA, NASA) developing novel methods for navigation in GPS degraded/denied and tools to model multi-agent autonomous systems. Recently, he has been working on advanced perception based on machine learning, modeling and verification of complex systems, and compositional abstractions for decision making. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

    The Impact of Inclusivity on Innovation, 4:05PM – 5:00 PM Monday, Oct. 25, 2021.
    More details here.


    An Overview of Modeling, Estimation, and Control Funding Opportunities at NSF, 4:05PM – 5:00 PM Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2021.
    More details here.


    Underrepresented Stories in Controls & Robotics Industry, 12:55-14:00 PM Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021.
    More details here.