Message of the Coordinator
Welcome to the December DYSCO newsletter.
In November this year, Johan Schoukens from the VUB team has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) "Advanced Grant" for his project "Data Driven Structured Modeling or Nonlinear Dynamic Systems". Johan's project will start in the beginning of 2013 for five years with a global budget of 2.5 million Euro. Starting in April this year was also the ERC Advanced Grant of Johan Suykens from the KULeuven team on "Advanced Data-Driven Black-box Modelling". I would like to congratulate Johan and Johan (!) for these recognitions of the exceptional quality of their research.
The ERC was established in 2007 with an annual budget of 300 MEuro. Since then, the budget has steadily increased. In 2013 it will reach 1.700 MEuro, about 15% of the overall FP7 budget. The ERC is widely recognized for the vital role it plays in supporting European leadership in world class research. Today, ERC grants ("starting grants", "consolidators grants" and "advanced grants") are even used to measure research excellence at institutional or country level. It is therefore a very good sign for our network that it includes two ERC grantees and I hope that there are many more to come in the future!
Among the many other informations you will find in this newsletter let me mention the existence of travel grants for DYSCO researchers to visit our Princeton and Stanford partners (information below). Please do not hesitate to use these opportunities.
Finally, I use the opportunity of this newsletter myself to already wish you the best for 2013 and a Merry Christmas!
Vincent Blondel
DYSCO coordinator
Newsletter subscription
The newsletter Dysco News is the monthly newsletter of the Belgian Interuniversity Attraction Pole "Dynamical systems, control and optimization" (DYSCO) funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office. The DYSCO network includes partners at UCL, KUL, UGent, VUB, ULg, UMons, FUNDP, and international partners at Stanford, Princeton and MIT. It is the Belgian National member of IFAC. The newsletter contains information on research activities (visitors, seminars, publications, vacancies, etc.) related to dynamical systems, control and optimization. Subscription is free and open to anyone: subscribe here, or unsubscribe.
Staff Movements and Visitors
UCL
- Nicolas Tremblay (ENS Lyon) will visit us on November 29-30. He was invited by V. Blondel.
- Roland Hildebrand (Imag, Grenoble) will visit us from December 4 to 6. His host is J-C Delvenne.
- Sang Hoon Lee (Oxford University) will visit us on December 13-14. He will work with V. Blondel and his team.
- Ilse Ipsen (North Carolina State University) will stay at UCL from December 16 to 19 as a member of the thesis jury of Chia-Tche Chang.
FUNDP
- Anastasios (aka Tassos) NOULAS, Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University, UK (December 10, 2012)
- Fernando ANTONIO, Department of Physics, Maringá State University, Brazil (October 1, 2012 - March 31, 2013)
Seminars
UCL
- December 4, 2012 - 14:00 - Euler seminar room
Roland Hildebrand (Imag, Grenoble), A deterministic optimal control problem with a chaotic solution. - December 11, 2012 - 11:00 - Euler seminar room
Kyomin Jung (KAIST Korea), Title to be announced. - December 11, 2012 - 14:00 - Euler seminar room
Elarbi Achhab (Université Cadi Ayyad and UCL), On Reachability Analysis of Infinite-Dimensional Semilinear Systems. - December 14, 2012 - 11:00 - Euler seminar room
Sang Hoon Lee (Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Oxford University, UK), Exploring Road Networks with Greedy Navigators and Their Core-Periphery Structures.
KUL
- December 4, 2012 – 11:00 – ESAT 91.91 - SISTA Seminar
Hadi Jamali Rad (TU Delft, The Netherlands), Sparsity-Aware Multi-Source TDOA Localization. - December 6, 2012 – 14:00-17:30 - Landbouwinstituut, Kasteelpark Arenberg 20, room 00.42 - SISTA-BIOMED workshop
Multimodal biomedical signal processing
More info : http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/scd/event.php?view=0&id=1687 - December 19, 2012 – 10:30 – ESAT 91.91 - KU Leuven Seminars on Optimization in Engineering
Roberto d'Ippolito (R&D Manager, Noesis Solutions, Belgium), Large scale optimization for engineering systems - challenges and approaches
ULg
- Friday 14/12/2012 - 11:00 - Room R7, Montefiore Institute (B28)
Gunnar W. Klau (VU University Amsterdam)
FUNDP
- December 10, 2012 - 3 pm - Salle de Conférence du Département de Mathématique (room E25), 2nd floor of the Faculté des Sciences Economiques, Sociales et de Gestion building, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur
Anastasios (aka Tassos) NOULAS (Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University), Perspectives of Human Mobility in Location-based Social Networks: Models and Applications. - December 19, 2012 - 1 pm - Salle de Conférence du Département de Mathématique (room E25), 2nd floor of the Faculté des Sciences Economiques, Sociales et de Gestion building, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur
Phillipe RODRIGUES SAMPAIO (naXys and Department of Mathematics, University of Namur), Constrained derivative-free optimization.
Theses defenses
UCL
- Chia-Tche Chang, Heuristic optimization methods for three matrix problems, Supervisor : V. Blondel. December 18, 2012 - 16:00, BARB94, Place Sainte-Barbe, Louvain-la-Neuve.
- Heather Maclean, Modelling Plant Growth - Developing Simple Identifiable Dynamic Models for Control, Supervisor : Denis Dochain. December 20, 2012 - 16:00, SUD19, Place Croix du Sud, Louvain-la-Neuve.
KUL
- Ivan Lule, Metabolic characterization and engineering of Streptomyces lividans producing heterologous proteins, thesis advisors : Jan Van Impe, Jozef Anné, Kristel Bernaerts. December 18, 2012 - 17:15 - Aula van de Tweede Hoofdwet, Thermotechnisch Instituut Kasteelpark Arenberg 41, 3001 Heverlee.
UGent
- Mohammad Moradzadeh, Voltage Coordination in Multi-Area Power Systems via Distributed Model Predictive Control, thesis advisors: René Boel and Lieven Vandevelde. December 20, 2012, 16:00, room Jozef Plateau, Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Gent.
Graduate School in Systems, Optimization, Control and Networks
The SOCN Graduate School 2012-2013 programme is available on-line : http://sites.uclouvain.be/socn/
The next course is entitled Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization: Applications, Algorithms, and Computation. It will be given by Sven LEYFFER (Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory) on February 18, 20, 22, 25, 27 and March 1, 2013 (9:15-12:15) at UCL, Bâtiment Euler, 4 av. Georges Lemaître, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (room A002, ground floor).
More information about this course : http://sites.uclouvain.be/socn/Courses/Courses2012-3
On-line registrations are welcome via this form.
Study Days, Workshops and Summer Schools
32nd Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control : March 26 to 28, 2013
Venue: OL FOSSE D'OUTH, Houffalize, Belgium
The aim of this meeting is to promote research activities and cooperation between researchers in the broad area of Systems and Control.
The deadline for receipt of contributed abstracts is January 11, 2013.
Information on the scientific program and the call for papers can be found at http://saas.ulb.ac.be/bm2013/
20th International Conference on Analytical and Stochastic Modelling Techniques and Applications (ASMTA 2013)
SMACS Research Group is organising the 20th International Conference on Analytical and Stochastic Modelling Techniques and Applications (ASMTA 2013) in Ghent, 10-12 July 2013.
Topics of interest include Stochastic Control, Decision Processes and Optimisation, amongst others. Additional information of the conference can be found on the conference web site: http://telin.ugent.be/~df/asmta2013.
The deadline for paper submission is 22 February 2013.
Awards
UCL
Vincent Blondel was elevated to IEEE Fellow for contributions to computational analysis of systems and networks.
Vacancies
Faculty position in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (bu.edu/ece) at Boston University
We are looking for people with active research in optimization and machine learning, especially pertaining to the processing of very large data sets ("big data"). This is an area we plan to grow. Already, a number of ongoing activities exist with applications ranging from cyber physical systems, video analytics, computational biology, and medical informatics. In the latter areas, there are active collaborations with the medical campus.
Depending on the candidate, there are opportunities for a joint appointment with the Division of Systems Engineering (bu.edu/se), and collaborative opportunities in the university-wide Center for Information and Systems Engineering (bu.edu/systems).
The position is at the Assistant Professor level. For exceptional candidates however, we may consider more senior appointments. If you have students, postdocs, or collaborators that may be interested in this position please inform them and/or feel free to contact me. Details on the application process are at http://www.bu.edu/ece/about/employment/facultysearch/
Miscellaneous
DYSCO travel grants for Princeton and Stanford
There are three international partners within the network DYSCO (2012-2017): Stanford, MIT and Princeton.
All members of the DYSCO network are encouraged to initiate (or intensify) collaborations with our international partners. One of the instruments for doing so are travel grants. Every year there will be 10 travel grants of 2.000 € each available to DYSCO Belgian partners for scientific visits to Stanford and Princeton (no grants are available at the moment for MIT).
The procedure for applying to one of these grants is as follows: send a short (two paragraphs) description of the purpose of the visit, a short CV and the dates and a budget for your intended visit. Applications should be sent at least two months in advance but there are no particular deadlines and decisions are made within two weeks.
Applications for Stanford should be sent to Joos Vandewalle (Joos.Vandewalle@esat.kuleuven.be) and applications to Princeton should be sent to Rodolphe Sepulchre (R.Sepulchre@ulg.ac.be). Reimbursements are organized by the University of Liège for visits to Princeton and by the KULeuven for visits to Stanford.
Call for applications : Blaise Pascal Research Chairs
Blaise Pascal Research Chairs were established in 1996 by the State and the Ile-de-France region. Each chair allows highly qualified, internationally acclaimed, foreign research scientists in all disciplines, accompanied if they wish by other research workers, to continue their work on a scientific project for a 12 months period that could be spread over two years in a higher learning institution or research institution in Paris/Ile-de-France.
The management of these chairs is undertaken by the "Fondation de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure". A scientific committee selects the candidates every year. The Blaise Pascal chairs have acquired a solid reputation in the francophone scientific community and their attribution is an important milestone in a scientific career.
More information here : http://www.chaires-blaise-pascal.org.
The deadline is January 17, 2013.
Papers produced by the IAP Network
UCL
Orban de Xivry, Jean-Jacques; Ahmadi-Pajouh, Mohammad Ali; Harran, Michelle D.; Salimpour, Yousef; Shadmehr, Reza, Changes in corticospinal excitability during reach adaptation in force fields, In: Journal of Neurophysiology, (October 2012). doi:10.1152/jn.00785.2012 (In press). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/116563
Chang, Chia-Tche; Blondel, Vincent, An experimental study of approximation algorithms for the joint spectral radius, In: Numerical Algorithms, (2012). doi:10.1007/s11075-012-9661-z (In press). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/117082
Chang, Chia-Tche; Gorissen, Bastien; Melchior, Samuel, Fast oriented bounding box optimization on the rotation group SO(3,R), 5th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia (SIGGRAPH ASIA 2012) (Singapore, 28/11/2012 - 01/12/2012). Accepted for presentation. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/117079
N. Boumal, A. Singer, P.-A. Absil and V. D. Blondel, Cramér-Rao bounds for synchronization of rotations, submitted, 2012.
S. Easter Selvan, Pierre B. Borckmans, Amit Chattopadhyay, P.-A. Absil, Spherical Mesh Adaptive Direct Search for Separating Quasi-uncorrelated Sources by Range-based Independent Component Analysis, submitted, 2012.
KUL
Andersson J., Akesson J., Diehl M., Dynamic optimization with CasADi, Internal Report 12-180, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. Accepted for publication in 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
Tran Dinh Q., Necoara I., Savorgnan C., Diehl M., An inexact perturbed path-following method for Lagrangian decomposition in large-scale separable convex optimization, Internal Report 12-181, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. SIAM Journal on Optimization, pp. 1-31.
Tran Dinh Q., Savorgnan C., Diehl M., Adjoint-based predictor-corrector sequential convex programming for parametric nonlinear optimization, SIAM Journal on Optimization, vol. 22, no. 4, Oct. 2012, pp. 1258-1284.
Tran Dinh Q., Michiels W., Gros S., Diehl M., An inner convex approximation algorithm for BMI optimization and applications in control, Internal Report 12-183, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. Accepted for publication in Proc. of the 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pp. 1-6.
Ferreau H.J., Kraus T., Vukov M., Saeys W., Diehl M., High-Speed Moving Horizon Estimation based on Automatic Code Generation, Internal Report 12-184, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2012), Hawaii, United States.
Mall R., Suykens J.A.K., L0-reduced LSSVMs for Large Scale Data, Internal Report 12-185, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Logist F., Telen D., Houska B., Diehl M., Van Impe J., Multi-objective optimal control of dynamic bioprocesses using ACADO Toolkit, Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, May 2012.
Janssens P., Pipeleers G., Diehl M., Swevers J., Energy-optimal time allocation of a series of point-to-point motions, Internal Report 12-187, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Van Loock W., Pipeleers G., Diehl M., Swevers J., Optimal path following for differentially flat systems, Internal Report 12-188, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Debrouwere F., Van Loock W., Pipeleers G., Tran Dinh Q., Diehl M., De Schutter J., Swevers J., Time-optimal path following for robots with convex-concave constraints using sequential convex programming, Internal Report 12-189, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Janssens P., Pipeleers G., Diehl M., Pinte G., Swevers J., Energy-optimal time allocation of a series of point-to-point motions : demonstration on a badminton robot, Internal Report 12-190, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. Accepted for publication in Mechatronics - REM 2012.
Debrouwere F., Van Loock W., Pipeleers G., Tran Dinh Q., Diehl M., De Schutter J., Swevers J., Time-optimal robot path following with Cartesian acceleration constraints : a convex optimization approach, in Proc. of the 13th Mechatronics Forum International Conference, Linz, Austria, Sep. 2012, pp. 469-475.
Gros S., Ahmed H., Geebelen K., Swevers J., Diehl M., In-flight estimation of the aerodynamic roll damping and trim angle for a tethered aircraft based on multiple-shooting, in Proc. of the 16th IFAC Symposium on System Identification (SYSID 2012), Brussels, Belgium, Jul. 2012, pp. 1407-1412.
Debrouwere F., Van Loock W., Diehl M., De Schutter J., Swevers J., Time-optimal robot path tracking with Cartesian acceleration constraint, in Proc. of the Benelux Meeting on Systems and Control, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Mar. 2012, 125 p.
Geebelen K., Ahmed H., Vukov M., Gros S., Swevers J., Diehl M., An experimental test set-up for launch/recovery of an airborne wind energy (AWE) system, Internal Report 12-194, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. Accepted for publication in American Control Conference, Montreal, June 2012.
Geebelen K., Wagner A., Gros S., Swevers J., Diehl M., Moving horizon estimation with a huber penalty function for robust pose estimation of tethered airplanes, Internal Report 12-195, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Gillis J., Goos J., Geebelen K., Swevers J., Diehl M., Optimal periodic control of power harvesting tethered airplanes, Internal Report 12-196, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012. Accepted for publication in American Control Conference, 2012.
Debrouwere F., Van Loock W., Pipeleers G., Tran Dinh Q., Diehl M., De Schutter J., Swevers J., Time-optimal path following for robots with trajectory jerk constraints using sequential convex programming, Internal Report 12-197, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Tran Dinh Q., Sequential convex programming and decomposition approaches for nonlinear optimization, PhD thesis, Faculty of Engineering, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), Nov. 2012.
Mehrkanoon S., Suykens J.A.K., Time varying parameter estimation of delay differential equations using LS-SVMs, Internal Report 12-201, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Peluffo D., Alzate C., Suykens J.A.K., Castellanos G., Optimal data projection for Kernel Spectral Clustering, Internal Report 12-202, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
Arnout S., Suykens J.A.K., Degrande G., De Roeck G., Lombaert G., Structural optimization using coupled local minimizers, Internal Report 12-203, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2012.
D. Telen, B. Houska, F. Logist, E. Van Derlinden, M. Diehl and J. Van Impe, Optimal Experiment Design under Process Noise using Riccati Differential Equations, Journal of Process Control. Date of acceptance: November 2012.
UGent
Alain Sarlette, Jing Dai, Yannick Phulpin & Damien Ernst, Cooperative frequency control with a multi-terminal high-voltage DC network, Automatica, Volume 48, Issue 12, December 2012, Pages 3128-3134.
W. Ipanaque, C. Vallejos, R. De Keyser, A. Dutta, J. Oliden, R. Saavedra, Modelo y control predictivo no lineal de un secador de disco rotatorio para la produccion de harina de pescado, 15th Latin American Control Conference (CLCA 2012), 23-26 OCT, Lima, Peru, 93-99, 2012.
W. Ipanaque, C. Vallejos, R. De Keyser, A Dutta, J. Oliden, J. Manrique, Control no lineal iterativo predictivo de evaporador en obtencion de bio-etanol, 15th Latin American Control Conference (CLCA 2012), 23-26 OCT, Lima, Peru, 56-62, 2012.
Eline De Cuypere, Analysis of coupled queues, Sixth Young European Queueing Theorists (YEQT-VI) workshop, "Analytic methods in queueing systems", 1-3 November, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2012 (http://www.eurandom.nl/events/workshops/2012/YEQT2012/YEQT-VI-program.html)
VUB
B Sanchez, C R Rojas, G Vandersteen, R Bragos and J Schoukens, On the calculation of the D-optimal multisine excitation power spectrum for broadband impedance spectroscopy measurements, Measurement Science and Technology, Vol. 23, No. 8, (2012) 085702 (15pp).
P. Thummala and J. Schoukens, Estimation of the FRF Through the Improved Local Bandwidth Selection in the Local Polynomial Method, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 61, No. 10, October 2012, pp. 2833–2843.
David Westwick, Johan Schoukens, Initial estimates of the linear subsystems of Wiener–Hammerstein models, Automatica, Vol. 48, No. 11, November 2012, Pages 2931-2936.
J. Paduart, L. Lauwers, R. Pintelon, J. Schoukens, Identification of a Wiener–Hammerstein system using the polynomial nonlinear state space approach, Control Engineering Practice, Volume 20, Issue 11, November 2012, Pages 1133-1139.
Charles Nader, Wendy Van Moer, Niclas Björsell, Kurt Barbé and Peter Händel, Reducing the Analog and Digital Bandwidth Requirements of RF Receivers for Measuring Periodic Sparse Waveforms, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 61, No. 11, November 2012, pp. 2960-2971.
Mikaya L. D. Lumori, Johan Schoukens, John Lataire, Approximate ML Estimation of the Period and Spectral Content of Multiharmonic Signals Without User Interaction, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 61, No. 11, November 2012, pp. 2953-2959.
Yves Rolain, Frans Verbeyst, Why professional LSNA, NVNA, scope and VSA users care about accurate phase information, Workshop organized at the 42nd European Microwave Conference (W09 (EuMC/EuMIC), 29 October - 1 November 2012, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
UMons
Andres Donoso-Bravo and Francis Mairet, Determining the limiting reaction in anaerobic digestion processes. How has this been tackled?, J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol. (2012) 87: 1375-1378.
Andres Donoso-Bravo, Sara Pérez-Elvira, Alain Vande Wouwer and Fernando Fdz-Polanco, Long-term hydrolytic capacity evaluation of a thermophilic anaerobic digester treating sewage sludge, Water Science & Technology (2012) 66.11: 2378-2384.
Thierry Castermans and Matthieu Duvinage, Corticomuscular coherence revealed during treadmill walking: another evidence of supraspinal control in human locomotion, submitted to Journal of Physiology.
Nicolas Riche, Matei Mancas, Matthieu Duvinage, Makiese Mibulumukini, Bernard Gosselin and Thierry Dutoit, RARE2012: a multi-scale rarity-based approach for saliency detection with its comparative statistical analysis, preprint submitted to Image Communication.
Thierry Castermans, Matthieu Duvinage, Nicolas Riche, Online emotion classification from electroencephalographic signals : a first study conducted in a realistic movie theater, submitted to the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing (ICAISC 2013).
Matthieu Duvinage, Jeremie Cubetta, Thierry Castermans, Mathieu Petieau, Thomas Hoellinger, Guy Cheron and Thierry Dutoit, A Quantitative Comparison of the Most Sophisticated EOG-based Eye Movement Recognition Techniques, submitted to IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2013).
FUNDP
Ch. Hubaux and A. Lemaître, Secular evolution of space debris motion due to Earth's shadows, submitted to CM&DA (November 2012).
IAP Contact Persons
| UCL | Isabelle Hisette |
| KUL | Ida Tassens |
| UGent | Margot Roels |
| VUB | Ann Pintelon |
| ULg | Sophie Cimino |
| UMons | Laurent Dewasme |
| FUNDP | Joseph Winkin |