Bringing Control to Students and Teachers CONFERENCE

20 IEEE Control Systems Magazine The IEEE Control Systems Society’s (CSS’s) Technical Committee on Control Education strives to bring control system concepts and technologies to the awareness of high school and middle school students and teachers. Control is used in many common devices and systems, such as computer hard drives, VCRs, automobiles, and aircraft but is usually hidden from view. The goal of this committee is to promote an increased awareness among students and teachers of the importance and cross-disciplinary nature of control and systems technology. To help meet these objectives, a workshop was held at the 42nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2003) in Maui, Hawaii, on Tuesday, 9 December 2003. About 250 students from the Maui School District, which spans the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai, attended this workshop, escorted by their teachers. In addition, teachers who had attended earlier workshops came from as far away as Florida to participate. Because of space limitations, several hundred additional students had to be turned away from this extraordinary field trip. Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, chair of the Technical Committee on Control Education and CDC 2003’s chair for Control Education Activities, organized the workshop with sponsorship from CDC 2003 and funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Kansas. Dr. Kishan Baheti, program director in NSF’s Division of Electrical and Communications Systems, provided the NSF funding. The Technical Committee on Control Education has organized similar workshops at a number of earlier conferences. Workshops for high school teachers were held at the American Control Conferences in Chicago (2000) and Denver (2003). A workshop for high school students was held at the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Las Vegas, Nevada, in December 2002. Control system experts from our technical community were recruited to present at the workshop based on their willingness and ability to present control topics at an appropriate level for secondary school students. These experts sought to describe control and system technology ideas to the students and teachers and to expose them to control applications and research. Workshop presenters included Raffaello D’Andrea of Cornell University, Christos Cassandras of Boston University, Theodore Djaferis of the University of Massachusetts, Richard Murray of the California Institute of Technology, Mark Spong of the University of Illinois, and Katsuhisa Furuta of the Tokyo Denki University. In addition, Brian Rosen of Pixar Animation Studios, Kishan Baheti of the National Science Foundation, Shane Haas of AlphaSimplex Group, and Suzanne Lenhart of the University of Tennessee presented related dynamic system, nanoscale system, and probability topics. The workshop began with welcomes from dignitaries from the NSF, the CSS, and CDC 2003. These included Vasundara Varadan, NSF division director for Electrical and Communications Systems; CSS President Cheryl Bringing Control to Students and Teachers CONFERENCE REPORT