Message of the Coordinators

We had a great study day a few weeks ago in Brussels: the VUB team had put together a very nice program with four top quality speakers covering a diversity of topics with a nice balance between theory and practice. The day was ended with a panel discussion on ERC grants which also was very informative. Many thanks to the local organizers (and especially the Pintelons), to the participants who carefully prepared their posters and to the speakers, Philippe Lefèvre, Frans van der Helm, Gaëtan Kerschen and Ivan Markovsky, for turning it into a successful event.


Vincent Blondel and Paul Van Dooren
DYSCO coordinators


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. Isystems, control and optimization. Subscription is free and open to anyone: subscribe here, or unsubscribe.


Staff Movements and Visitors

UCL
  • Dvijotham Krishnamurthy (University of Washington), invited by R. Jungers, from 4 to 8 December.
  • Alex Bazanella (Universidade de Porto Alegre) from 4 to 6 December.
  • Amit Singer (Princeton University), Rodolphe Sépulchre (University of Cambridge), A. d’Aspremont (ENS, Paris) : from 18 to 20 December.
KUL
  • Wout Swinnen, PhD, Promotor Sabine Van Huffel, December 1, 2013
VUB
  • Hao Chen, School of Systems Engineering, University of Reading, UK: from 12/11/2013 until 13/12/2013
  • Istvan Kollar, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), from 3/11/2013 until 7/11/2013
  • Gregorz Mzyk, Pawel Wachel and Przemyslaw Sliwinski, Wrocław University of Technology, from 17/12/2013 until 21/12/2013

Seminars

UCL
  • December 6, 2013 – 11:00, Euler seminar room
    Yurii Nesterov (UCL), Detecting communities by a voting model
  • December 17, 2013 – 14:00, Euler seminar room
    Arnaud Browet (UCL), Low-rank Similarity based Extraction of Roles in Networks
KUL
  • December 9, 2013 - 14:00 to 15:00. Room PW 00.01 at the Department of Chemical Engineering, KULeuven, W. de Croylaan 46, 3001 Heverlee
    Prof. Jesús Picó (Technical University of Valencia), Estimation and control of bioprocesses: from bioreactor to cell
VUB

ELEC Seminars take place at the department ELEC (Pleinlaan 2, Building K, 7th floor) every two weeks, normally on Thursdays in the morning. The final time and date are announced at least one week before a seminar at https://intranet.vub.ac.be/doctoral-schools/nse/team-seminars/elec-seminars/.

ULg

Systmod weekly seminars normally take place on each Friday, 11am. They are announced on this webpage.

UNamur

Unless otherwise stated, naXys weekly seminars take place on each Tuesday, 1pm, in the Salle de Conférence (room E25), Department of Mathematics, 2nd floor of the Faculté des Sciences Economiques, Sociales et de Gestion building, Rempart de la Vierge 8, Namur. They are announced on this webpage.

The seminars that are currently scheduled for December 2013 are listed below:

  • December 10, 1 pm. Isabel Cordero-Carrión (Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTh), Observatory of Paris-Meudon), Dealing with partial differential equations in numerical relativity.
  • December 17, 1 pm. Ekaterina Kutafina (Department of Mathematics, UHasselt), Oscillations in multi-time-scale models.

Thesis defenses

KUL

Pieter-Jan D'Huys, Metabolic modeling of Streptomyces lividans, a cell factory for heterologous protein production, 9 December 2013, 17h @Aula van de Tweede Hoofdwet, Thermotechnisch Instituut Kasteelpark Arenberg 41, 3001 Heverlee.

Graduate School in Systems, Optimization, Control and Networks

The SOCN Graduate School 2013-2014 programme is available here : http://sites.uclouvain.be/socn/

The next course is entitled Statistical machine learning. It will be given by Guillaume OBOZINSKI (Ecole des Ponts - ParisTech) on February 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21, 2013 (9:00-12:00) 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/Courses2013-3

On-line registrations are welcome via this form.

Study Days, Workshops and Summer Schools

Graduate School on Control

Course title : The Scenario Approach - Theory and Applications

Instructors : Marco C. Campi and Simone Garatti

Dates : 27-31 January, 2014

Place : Supelec - Paris sud

More info : http://www.eeci-institute.eu/IGSC2014

Advance registration closes on December 20.
Financial support is provided to selected participants.


Miscellaneous

Back to Belgium Grants of the federal Science Policy : the call for proposals is now open

The Back to Belgium Grants of the federal Science Policy are intended to foster the return to Belgium of talented researchers doing R&D in a foreign research centre. Each year, the jury meets in May and proposes to the Minister in charge a list of candidates considered apt to receive a 24 months funding. The selection criteria are mainly based on the scientific level of the candidate, the quality and the feasibility of the research proposal, the post-doc expertise acquired abroad and its possible use and its contribution to the host unit as well as the career perspectives in Belgium.

In order to palliate any defection, a reserve list is also foreseen. The jury is constituted of Belgian and foreign experts. Its composition takes into account the diversity of the proposals.

To this day, the Back to Belgium Grants have benefited to nearly 100 researchers.

The call for proposals for the selection 2014 is now open. The foreclosure date is February 28, 2014, 5 pm. The candidates will be informed personally about the future developments. Please contact Belspo for more information.

Web : http://www.belspo.be/belspo/organisation/call_grants_retour_en.stm

Papers produced by the IAP Network

UCL

Pierre B. Borckmans, S. Easter Selvan, Nicolas Boumal, P.-A. Absil, A Riemannian Subgradient Algorithm for Economic Dispatch with Valve-Point Effect, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Volume 255, 1 January 2014, Pages 848-866

Nicolas Boumal, Amit Singer, P.-A. Absil, Vincent D. Blondel, Cramér-Rao bounds for synchronization of rotations, Information and Inference: A Journal of the IMA, 2013. doi:10.1093/imaiai/iat006

Augustin Lefèvre, François Glineur, P.-A. Absil, A nuclear-norm based convex formulation for informed source separation, Proceedings of the 21st European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN 2013), Bruges, Belgium, April 24-25-26, 2013.

Filippo Pompili, Nicolas Gillis, François Glineur, P.-A. Absil, ONP-MF: An Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Algorithm with Application to Clustering, Proceedings of the 21st European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks (ESANN 2013), Bruges, Belgium, April 24-25-26, 2013.

Y. Nesterov, Subgradient methods for huge-scale optimization problems, Mathematical Programming, (2013) DOI 10.1007/s10107-013-0686-4.

Y. Nesterov, V. Protasov, Optimizing the Spectral Radius, SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications, 34(3), 999-1013 (2013).

Daye, Pierre; Blohm, Gunnar; Lefèvre, Philippe, Catch-up saccades in head-unrestrained conditions reveal that saccade amplitude is corrected using an internal model of target movement. In: Journal of Vision, (2013). (Accepted). http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/135324

KUL

E. Noriega, E. Velliou, E. Van Derlinden, L. Mertens, J. F. Van Impe 2013. Effect of cell immobilization on heat-induced sublethal injury of Escherichia coli, Salmonella Typhimurium and Listeria innocua, Food Microbiology 36, 355-364.

E. G. Velliou, E. Noriega, E. Van Derlinden, L. Mertens, K. Boons, A. H. Geeraerd, F. Devlieghere, J. F. Van Impe 2013. The effect of colony formation on the heat inactivation dynamics of Escherichia coli K12 and Salmonella Typhimurium, Food Research International 54: 1746-1752.

P. Van den Kerkhof, G. Gins, R. Van den Broeck and J.F.M. Van Impe 2013. Multivariate assessment of activated sludge stability in lab-scale experiments, Process Biochemistry 48: 1789-1793.

M. Vallerio, J. Van Impe and F. Logist 2014. Tuning of NMPC controllers via multi-objective optimisation, Computers and Chemical Engineering 61 (2014) 38–50.

Wynants L., Timmerman D., Bourne T., Van Huffel S., Van Calster B., Screening for data clustering in multicenter studies : the residual intraclass correlation, BMC Medical Research Methodology, vol. 31, Oct. 2013, 128 (11 pg) p.

Kaijser J., Sayasneh A., Van Hoorde K., Ghaem-Maghami S., Bourne T., Timmerman D., Van Calster B., Presurgical diagnosis of adnexal tumours using mathematical models and scoring systems: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Internal Report 13-222, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2013. Accepted for publication in Human Reproduction Update.

Widjaja D., Vandeput S., Van Hoorde K., Van Huffel S., Aubert A.E., Cardiovascular Autonomic Adaptation of the Mars500 Crew during Parabolic Flight, Internal Report 13-224, ESAT-SISTA, K.U.Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), 2013.

De Moor B., Massaal, open en online naar een heuse onderwijsomwenteling ?, in Essay Mee met morgen, (Boenders E., ed.), Academia Press (Brussel, Belgie), 2013, pp. 72-75.

Vandewalle J., Emeriti, Geniaal, vol. 23, Oct. 2013, 11 p.

Vandewalle J., De ijkingstoets : wat hebben we bereikt na de editie 2013 ?, Geniaal, vol. 23, Oct. 2013, pp. 6-7.

Geth F., Verveckken J., Leemput N., Van Roy J., Beerten J., Tielens P., De Smedt V., Iacovella S., Hunyadi B., Koolen N., De Clercq H., Gielen G., Puers G., Van Huffel S., Belmans R., Deconinck G., Dehaene W., Driesen J., Development of an Open-Source Smart Energy House for K-12 Education, in Proc. of the IEEE Power & Energy Society Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, Jul. 2013, pp. 1-5.

UGent

E. De Cuypere, K. De Turck, and D. Fiems, Performance Analysis of a Kitting Process as a Paired Queue, Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 843184, 10 pages, Received 19 February 2013; Revised 14 May 2013; Accepted 14 May 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/843184

VUB

Laurent Vanbeylen, Nonlinear LFR block-oriented model: Potential benefits and improved, user-friendly identification method, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 62, No. 12, December 2013, pp. 3374-3383

Pintelon, R., E. Louarroudi, and J. Lataire, Detecting and quantifying the nonlinear and time-variant effects in FRF measurements using periodic excitations, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, Vol. 62, No. 12, December 2013, pp. 3361-3373

Ivan Markovsky, Recent progress on variable projection methods for structured low-rank approximation, Signal Processing, Vol. 96, March 2014, pp. 406-419

Anna Marconato, Maarten Schoukens, Yves Rolain, Johan Schoukens, Study of the Effective Number of Parameters in Nonlinear Identification Benchmarks, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

Ivan Markovsky, Approximate identification with missing data, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

Ivan Markovsky, Exact identification with missing data, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

Koen Tiels and Johan Schoukens, From coupled to decoupled polynomial representations in parallel Wiener-Hammerstein models, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

Laurent Vanbeylen, Ebrahim Louarroudi and Rik Pintelon, How nonlinear system identification can benefit from recent time-varying tools: the time-varying best linear approximation, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

R. Pintelon, E. Louarroudi, and J. Lataire, Nonparametric Estimation of the Best Linear Time-Invariant Approximation of a Linear Time-Varying System, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

Schoukens, M.; Vandersteen, G.; Rolain, Y., An identification algorithm for parallel Wiener-Hammerstein systems, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013

UMons

P. Suvarov, A. Kienle, C. Nobre, G. De Weireld, A. Vande Wouwer. Cycle to cycle adaptive control of simulated moving bedchromatographic separation processes. Accepted in Journal of Process Control. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jprocont.2013.11.001

Z. Amribt, L. Dewasme, A. Vande Wouwer, Ph. Bogaerts. Optimization and Robustness Analysis of Hybridoma Cell Fed-Batch Cultures Using the Overflow Metabolism Model. Submitted to Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering Journal.

G. Araujo Pimentel, M. Benavides, D. Coutinho, L. Dewasme and A. Vande Wouwer. Robust Partial Feedback Linearizing Control and Switched Observer Design for Fed-Batch Bioreactors. Submitted to European Control Conference, Strasbourg, France.

IAP Contact Persons

UCLIsabelle Hisette
KULIda Tassens
UGentMargot Roels
VUBAnn Pintelon
ULgSophie Cimino
UMonsLaurent Dewasme
UNamurJoseph Winkin

Useful links : UCL | KUL | UGent | VUB | ULg | UMons | UNamur | Stanford | Princeton | MIT