Message from the Coordinator

On November 27, we will have the automn study day of our DYSCO network. It is organized by the team we call KUL2 (Dept of Computer Science) headed by Dirk Roose. The preliminary programme is attached. As you will see, the team of promotors of DYSCO has launched a new initiative for this study day, namely a poster session at which the newcomers to the network will present the topic of their research. This will be a great opportunity for the PhD students who have just started to get feedback and ideas on their research programme from more senior people in the network, with the possibility of developing possible collaborations. May ask the presenters and their supervisors to take this opportunity to consider possible co-supervision of your thesis by an academic from another team. This is what the IAP network is all about.

The study day will also mark the mid-term of the present phase of the IAP programme (2007-2011). We will briefly explain, particularly for the newcomers, what the DYSCO network contributes to all of us, and where our network stands in the various sub-disciplines where we are active.

I wish to thank the new PhD students, for whom this will almost surely be the first poster presentation, for their contribution to the success of this new iniative.

Michel Gevers
DYSCO coordinator

Staff Movements and Visitors

UCL-INMA
  • Ababacar DIAGNE, PhD student (Université Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, Sénégal), is carrying out a scientific stay at the CESAME (21 October - 15 December). He is working with Georges Bastin in the field of hydraulic systems control described by Saint-Venant equations.
KUL 1
  • Personnel : 01/11/09, Ann-Sophie Decaigny, promotor Sabine Van Huffel.
  • Visitor : 28/11/09, Svetlana Grigoryeva, host Johan Suykens.
UGent-SYSTeMS
  • Abhishek DUTTA and Yu ZHONG will work on the IWT-SBO project LeCoPro: Learning Control for Production Machines. This project runs from 01 September 2009 until 31 August 2013 and is in collaboration with FMTC, KULeuven and VUB.
  • Daniel NEAMTU will be with us from 1 October 2009 until 31 August 2010, working on Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Swarm Formation.

Theses Defences

UCL-INMA

Robert Chares (thesis advisor : F. Glineur), Cones and Interior-Point Algorithms for Structured Convex Optimization Involving Powers and Exponentials, Friday 30 October 2009, 14:00, Auditoire BARB92 (Place Sainte-Barbe, Louvain-la-Neuve - Parking 11).

KUL 1

Oscar Mauricio Agudelo, The application of proper arothogonal decomposition to the control of tubular reactors, on November 10, 2009 at 10:00 in Auditorium of the Arenberg Castle, Leuven.

UGent-SYSTeMS

Clara Ionescu, Fractional Order Models for the Human Respiratory System, on Monday 30 November 2009, at 16:00 in Conference Room "JozefPlateau" in Jozef Plateaustraat 22, Gent.

Seminars

UCL
  • November 3, 2009 - 14:00 - Euler Building
    Christophe De Vleeschouwer (TELE, UCL), Multi-sensored vision for autonomous production of personalized video summaries.
  • November 5, 2009 - 11:00 - Euler Building
    Dr Ian Morris (Warwick Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, UK), Estimating the joint spectral radius via ergodic theory.
  • November 10, 2009 - 14:00 - Euler Building
    Michel Gevers (CESAME), Identifiability, informativity, information matrix and the Prediction Error criterion: a new look at the connections.
  • November 17, 2009 - 14:00 - Euler Building
    Eric Bullinger (ULg), A Systems Biology Approach to Apoptosis Signalling.
  • November 20, 2009 - 11:00 - Euler Building
    Lorenzo Sella (CWI, Amsterdam), Computation of symbolic dynamics of one and two dimensional discrete time systems.
  • November 24, 2009 - 14:00 - Euler Building
    Luc Vandendorpe (ELEC/TELE, UCL), Rate-Optimized Power Allocation for Relayed OFDM transmission in different scenarii.
  • December 1, 2009 - 14:00 - Euler Building
    Damien Ernst (ULg), Learning about near-optimal policies from a sample of trajectories.
KUL 1
  • November 12, 2009 - 16:00 in Room ESAT 01.57 - SISTA Seminar
    Philippe Dreesen, From solving systems of polynomial equations to linear algebra.
  • November 25, 2009 - 17:00 in Aud. Arenberg Castle - Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering
    Dominique Bonvin (EPFL, Lausanne), Adaptive optimization in the presence of uncertainty.

Papers produced by the IAP Network

UCL

M. Ishteva, L. De Lathauwer, P.-A. Absil, S. Van Huffel, Best low multilinear rank approximation of higher-order tensors, based on the Riemannian trust-region scheme, Technical report ESAT-SISTA-09-142, submitted, 2009.

A. Favache, D. Dochain, Power-shaping of reaction systems: the CSTR case study, submitted to Automatica, 2009.

J.-C. Delvenne, What is a universal computing machine?, Applied Mathematics and Computation, Volume 215, Issue 4, pp. 1368-1374, 2009.

J.-C. Delvenne, R. Carli, S. Zampieri, Optimal strategies in the Average Consensus Problem, Systems & Control Letters 58, pp. 759-765, 2009.

T. Ivanov, B. Anderson, P.-A. Absil, M. Gevers, On Tight Upper Bounds on the Supremum Norm using Norms induced by Inner Products, submitted to Automatica, 2009.

N. Gillis, F. Glineur, Using Underapproximations for Sparse Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, Journal of Pattern Recognition, in press, 2009.

L. Campestrini, D. Eckhard, M. Gevers, A. Bazanella, Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning for Non Minimum Phase Plants, submitted to Automatica, 2009.

KUL 1

Assecondi S., Vanderperren K., Novitskiy N., Ramautar J., Fias W., Staelens S., Stiers P., Sunaert S., Van Huffel S., Lemahieu I., Effect of the static magnetic field of the MR-scanner on ERPs: evaluation of visual, cognitive and motor potentials, Internal Report 09-205a, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2009.

van Waterschoot T., Moonen M., Comparative evaluation of howling detection criteria in notch-filter-based howling suppression, Internal Report 09-207, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2009, Lirias number: 248334.

Breckpot M., Barjas Blanco T., De Moor B., Flood control of rivers with Model Predictive Control - proof of concept based on the river Demer in Belgium -, Internal Report 09-208, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2009, Lirias number: 248334.

Vandewalle J., Critical issues and current views on teaching basic circuits and systems in electrical engineering education, in Proc. of the ECCTD 2009, Antalya, Turkey, 2009, pp. 287-290, Lirias number: 247055.

Levin I., Naegler T., Kromer B., Diehl M., Francey R.J., Gomez-Pelaez A.J., Steele P., Wagenbach D., Weller R., Worthy D.E., Observations and modelling of the global distribution and long-term trend of atmospheric 14CO2, Internal Report 09-211, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2009, Accepted for publication in Tellus B., Lirias number: 247053.

Novitskiy N., Ramautar J.R., Vanderperren K., De Vos M., Vanrumste B., Stiers P., Van den Bergh B., Lagae L., Sunaert S., Van Huffel S., Wagemans J., The BOLD correlates of the visual P1 and N1 in single-trial analysis of simultaneous EEG-fMRI recording during a spatial detection task, Internal Report 09-212, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2009, Lirias number: 248331.

Zhang L., Liu X., Janssens F., Linag L., Glanzel W., Subject clustering analysis based on ISI category classification, Internal Report 09-213, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2009. Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetrics, Lirias number: 248329.

Gil-Cacho P., Vanwaterschoot T., Moonen M., Jensen S., Study and characterization of odd and even nonlinearities in electrodynamic loudspeakers by means of periodic random-phase multisines, in Proc. of the 127th Audio engineering Society (127th AES conv.), New York NY, USA, Oct. 2009, preprint 7841 p., Lirias number: 248310.

UGent-SYSTeMS

Ionescu C., Muntean I., De Keyser R., The respiratory impedance in an asymmetric model of the lung structure, in Proceedings of Int. Conf. on Understanding Intelligent and Complex Systems, 20-23 October 2009, Tg Mures, Romania.

Rofu M., Ionescu C., Chirita M., Modelling mechanical properties in native and biomimetically formed vascular grafts, Journal of Bionic Engineering (Elsevier), in press.

De Keyser R., Ionescu C., Modelling and Simulation of a light control system, journal of Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory (Elsevier), in press, DOI: 10.1016/j.simpat.2009.10.003.

Naumovic M., De Keyser R., Robayo F., Ionescu C., Developing a frequency response analyzer in MatLab-Simulink environment, accepted for 17th Telecommunication Forum (TELFOR2009), to be held on 24-26 November 2009, Belgrade, Serbia.

Hodrea R., Iulianetti S., Ionescu C., De Keyser R., Model development for Propofol and Remifentanil management during ICU anesthesia, accepted for presentation at the 3rd Int. Conf. on Bio-inspired Systems and Signals Processing (Biosignals 2010), to be held on 20-23 January 2010, Valencia, Spain.

Robayo F., Sendoya D., Hodrea R., Ionescu C., De Keyser R., Correlation analysis between Remifentanil and other signals recorded during ICU anesthesia, accepted for publication at the 7th IASTED Int. Conf. on Biomedical Engineering (BioMed 2010), to be held on 17-19 February 2010, Innsbruck, Austria.

VUB-ELEC

M. El-Barkouky, G. Vandersteen, P. Wambacq, Y. Rolain, A 7GHz FBAR overtone-based oscillator, European Microwave Week 2009, Rome, Italy, 28 September - 2 October, 2009.

J. Lataire, R. Pintelon, Non-parametric instantaneous FRF of a class of Time-Varying systems, Presentation of poster at the IUAP/PAI DYSCO study day, Leuven-Heverlee, Thermotechnisch Instituut, November 27, 2009.

A. Van Mulders, L. Vanbeylen, J. Schoukens, Reduction of polynomial nonlinear state-space models by means of nonlinear similarity transforms, Presentation of poster at the IUAP/PAI DYSCO study day, Leuven-Heverlee, Thermotechnisch Instituut, November 27, 2009.

G. Monteyne, G. Vandersteen, Behavioral modeling of the thermal dynamics of borefields for geothermal applications, Presentation of poster at the IUAP/PAI DYSCO study day, Leuven-Heverlee, Thermotechnisch Instituut, November 27, 2009.

E. Louarroudi, R. Pintelon, J. Lataire, Identification of periodically time-varying systems, Presentation of poster at the IUAP/PAI DYSCO study day, Leuven-Heverlee, Thermotechnisch Instituut, November 27, 2009.

ULB

Y. Dehouck, A. Grosfils, B. Folch, D. Gilis, Ph. Bogaerts, M. Rooman, Fast and accurate Predictions of Protein Stability Changes upon Mutations using statistical potentials and neural networks: PoPMuSiC-2.0,Bioinformatics, Vol. 25, No. 19. (1 October 2009), pp. 2537-2543.

Th. Delwiche, S. Aberkane, L. Catoire, S. Torfs, M. Kinnaert, Design of a static output feedback controller for bilateral teleoperation, Preprints of the 9th International Symposium on Robot Control (SYROCO'09), Gifu, Japan, pp 553-558.

Graduate School in Systems, Optimization, Control and Network.

To read this year's programme, please visit the Graduate School web site.

You can register electronically by filling in this form.

Study Days, Workshops and Summer Schools

PAI VI/4 DYSCO Study Day - 27 November 2009

Thermotechnisch Instituut, Kasteelpark Arenberg 41, Leuven-Heverlee

Public transport: bus 2 from the railway station of Leuven to 'Kantineplein' or train to railway station of Heverlee
Parking: small parking lot near the Arenberg castle; large parking lot on Celestijnenlaan 200 (near dept. Computer Science)

Programme :

09:30 Registration

10:00 Plenary lecture 1 : Continuation of periodic solutions directly in an experiment, Prof. Bernd Krauskopf, Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK

11:00 Poster session 1

12:00 Status of the IAP project and future of the DYSCO network

12:30 Lunch

14:00 Poster session 2 (new PhD researchers)

14:45 Poster session 3

15:45 Plenary lecture 2 : The thermodynamics of control: Maxwell's demon and Carnot engines, Dr. Jean-Charles Delvenne, UCL/INMA team

16:45 End


2nd Elgersburg School on Mathematical Systems Theory

Elgersburg (Germany) - March 8 - 13, 2010

Lecturers and topics :

Volker Mehrmann (TU Berlin): Differential-Algebraic Equations - Control and Numerics

Jan C. Willems (KU Leuven, Belgien): Behavioural Approach to Systems Theory

The school is addressed to PhD students in control, either in mathematics or engineering, and also to very good undergraduates.

A summer school in mathematical systems theory will also be organized in the forthcoming years on "hot" topics in control.

The location has a capacity for 40 students. The cost for the hotel including full board (evening March 7 - breakfast March 13) is EUR 510,- for a single room and EUR 400,- for a double room per person.

The organizers can provide travel cost and subsistence for 15 students. When applying, they are asked to provide their CV and a letter of reference from their supervisor.

The deadline for applications is December 15, 2009. The organizers will then rank the applications according to excellence and suitability. A list of all participants will be available on the web site by the mid of January, 2010.

Organizers : Achim Ilchmann (TU Ilmenau), Timo Reis (TU Berlin), Fabian Wirth (Universität Würzburg).


The sixth edition of the Conférence Internationale Francophone d'Automatique (CIFA 2010) will take place from 2 to 4 June 2010 in Nancy (France).

Communications can be submitted until 20 November 2009.

Contact : Prof. Didier MAQUIN, Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy


Job vacancies

Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)
Applied Mathematics

UCL invites applications for several faculty positions in Applied Mathematics :

953 - Discrete Mathematics: combinatorial optimization, algorithmic complexity, graph and network theory, information and coding theory,...
951 - Dynamical Systems: systems and control, identification, mathematical modelling, stochastic processes and differential equation,...
952 - Quantitative Energy Economics (GDF-SUEZ Chair).

Applicants should have a wide area of interest and a good record in research and teaching. They should have a doctoral degree, postdoctoral experience, and a recognized scientific publications record. Appointment level will depend on the candidates and their records of accomplishment. Applicants should be able to teach in English but are also expected to teach in French, possibly after a transition period.

Depending on his background, the successful candidate will be affilated with the newly established research institutes ICTEAM and/or IMMAQ. For more information on some of the existing research activities see: http://www.uclouvain.be/en-core.html, http://www.uclouvain.be/en-csam.html and http://www.uclouvain.be/inma.

The 575-year-old Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) is located on the university campus of Louvain-la-Neuve, 30km south of Brussels. The campus has over 20,000 students and about 5,000 members of staff. It is the largest university in the French-speaking part of Belgium. The university hosts research programs in the different topics listed above. According to various ranking, UCL is in the top-10 of European universities for Technology, and Belgium is in the top-3 countries for academic research.

Further information about the positions can be obtained from Professor Vincent Blondel, Email: vincent.blondel@uclouvain.be

The closing date for submitting applications is January 15, 2010. The appointment will start September 2010. Applicants are invited to follow the application procedure described at http://www.uclouvain.be/en-97537.html.

IAP Contact Persons

UCL-INMAIsabelle Hisette
KUL 1Ida Tassens, Kristel Bernaerts
UGent-SYSTeMSMargot Roels
VUB-ELECAnn Pintelon
KUL 2Wim Michiels, Jan Swevers
ULg-SYSTRodolphe Sepulchre
ULBMichel Kinnaert
FPMsAlain Vande Wouwer

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