Prof. Mitter wins Bellman award

April 18, 2007

Sanjoy Mitter, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Engineering Systems, has been notified by the board of the American Automatic Control Council that he is the winner of the 2007 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award. The notification specifically cites Prof. Mitter’s contributions to the unification of communication and control; nonlinear filtering and its relationship to stochastic control; optimization; optimal control and infinite-dimensional systems theory. Prof. Mitter will deliver a plenary presentation at the ACC awards luncheon, to be held in New York in July 2007 where he will formally accept the award.

The Bellman Award is given for distinguished career contributions to the theory or application of automatic control. It is the highest recognition of professional achievement for US control systems engineers and scientists. The American Automatic Control Council (AACC) is an association of the control systems divisions of eight member societies: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA); American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE); Association of Iron and Steel Engineers (AISE); American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE); American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (ISA), and the Society for Computer Simulation (SCS).

The Bellman Award is one of two major awards in the control field. Prof. Mitter won the other, the IEEE Control Systems Award, in 2000 for contributions to optimization, optimal control, and nonlinear filtering, and for interdisciplinary research that has expanded the boundaries of control theory.