This paper summarizes the findings and recommendations of a recent panel on Future Directions in Control, Dynamics, and Systems, sponsored by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. A set of grand challenges that illustrate some of the recommendations and opportunities are provided. Finally, the paper describes two new courses being developed at Caltech that are aligned with the recomme...

One of the grand challenges for society is global security in food and nutrition. The ‘‘perfect storm’’ metaphor has been used by Sir John Beddington to describe the scenario that wemight be heading for, with simultaneous shortages for food, water, and energy within the foreseeable future. This Select highlights the need for a truly multipronged approach across scientific disciplines and countr...

The results for heavy-light mesons are summarized in Table 1. The results presented here are based on the same statistical sample, consisting of 102 quenched configurations at β = 6.0 with lattice size 16 × 48, as used in our study of fB and fBs [1]. The details of the NRQCD action, the evolution equation for calculating the heavy quark propagator, the method used for setting the lattice scale,...

This paper tries to sum up the discussions held during the sessions of GREC’09, as well as at the final panel session. As it is always good to know where you are coming from, the paper briefly takes a look back at the discussions held two years earlier, before looking ahead at the future challenges for our research community. A number of points raised two years ago remain very much valid, but w...

This article lists fourteen open problems in artificial life, each of which is a grand challenge requiring a major advance on a fundamental issue for its solution. Each problem is briefly explained, and, where deemed helpful, some promising paths to its solution are indicated.

There exist several specialized tools that provide environments for the development and simulation of either pure Modelica models or pure signal based models. These environments have each their own advantages and flaws. solidThinking ActivateTM has been developed to mix these domains and take advantage of both of these approaches to system modeling. This paper presents this mixed Signal-Modelic...

In this paper, we explore the use of the diffusion geometry framework for the fusion of geometric and photometric information in local heat kernel signature shape descriptors. Our construction is based on the definition of a diffusion process on the shape manifold embedded into a high-dimensional space where the embedding coordinates represent the photometric information. Experimental results s...

In this paper, we explore the use of the diffusion geometry framework for the fusion of geometric and photometric information in local and global shape descriptors. Our construction is based on the definition of a diffusion process on the shape manifold embedded into a high-dimensional space where the embedding coordinates represent the photometric information. Experimental results show that su...