About Me

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Van den Hof was born in 1957 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees both from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands in 1982 and 1989, respectively. From 1986 to 1999 he was an assistant and associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Systems and Control Group of Delft University of Technology (TUD), The Netherlands. From 1999 to 2003 he was a full professor in the Signals, Systems and Control Group of the Department of Applied Physics at Delft University of Technology. From 2003 to 2014 he was full professor and founding co-director (together with M. Verhaegen) of the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), with appointments at the Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (3mE), and the Faculty of Applied Sciences. From 2004 to 2009 he was Department Head and Director of DCSC, and member of the management team of the Faculty 3mE of TUD. This role included the initiative for setting up an international MSc Programme Systems and Control.

Since 2012 he is full professor in the Control Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands and he has been Chair of this group in the period 2012-2022. Paul Van den Hof’s research interests are in issues of system identification, parametrization, signal processing and model-based control design, with applications in industrial process control systems, including petroleum reservoir engineering systems, mechanical servo systems and physical measurement systems.

He teaches in the graduate program of the research school DISC, and has been a guest lecturer in the Belgian graduate school on Systems and Control (1997, 2003, 2011), and in the University of Campina Grande, Brasil (2004), and he has been guest researcher at The University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia (1992, 2007), and the University of California at San Diego (2011). He is an IFAC Fellow and Life Fellow of IEEE.  Read Paul’s complete biography.

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ROLES AND ACTIVITIES

From 2005 until 2014 he was scientific director of the national research and graduate school “Dutch Institute of Systems and Control” (DISC), that is accredited by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and that has obtained recognition and funding as a national Graduate Programme by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2010. In this capacity he was the national representative of the Netherlands NMO in IFAC.

He was General Chair of the 13th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 2003, Editor of the Symposium Proceedings, and Guest-Editor of the Automatica Special Issue “Data-Based Modelling and System Identification”, March 2005. He was project coordinator of the EU funded project Autoprofit (Advanced Autonomous Model-Based Operation of Industrial Process Systems), 2010-2013.

He has been a member of the IFAC Council (1999-2005, 2017-2020), Associate Editor of Automatica (1992-1999), Automatica Editor for Technical Communiques and Rapid Publications (1999-2005), elected member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Control Systems Society (2003-2005), and member of the Administrative Council of the European Union Control Association (EUCA). In 2007 he was elected as IFAC Fellow and in 2008 as Fellow of IEEE. In the triennium 2017-2020 he served as Vice-President of IFAC, and Chair of IFAC’s Executive Board.

He currently holds an ERC Advanced Research Grant on Data-Driven Modelling in Dynamic Networks (2016-2022). He is elected member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Control Systems Society (2022-2025), and member of the Scientific Board of the Eindhoven Aritificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI).

Research

Explore my research

Professional Activities

CURRENT ACTIVITIES

  • Team leader of the Dutch Team of the European Research Network on System Identification (ERNSI)
  • Member of the International Advisory Board of MTA SZTAKI, Institute for Computer Science and Control of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
  • Member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Control Systems Society (2022-2025).
  • Member of the Scientific Board of the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI).
  • IFAC Advisor.
  • Technical Associate Editor for the 22nd IFAC World Congress, 9-14 July 2023, Yokohama, Japan.

FORMER ACTIVITIES

  • Chair of the International Program Committee of the 19th IFAC Symposium on System Identification – Learning Models for Decision and Control, 14-16 July 2021, Padova, Italy.
  • IFAC Vice-President and Chair of IFAC’s Executive Board (2017-2020).
  • Chair of the IFAC Awards Committee, and member of the IFAC Executive Board (2014-2017)
  • Vice-chair of IFAC Technical Committee 1.1, Modelling, Identification and Signal Processing (2011-2017)
  • Representative of the Dutch IFAC NMO in IFAC (2005-2014).
  • Scientific Director of  the Dutch Institute of Systems and Control (DISC) (2005 – 2014)
  • Automatica Editor for Rapid Publications and Technical Communiques (1999-2005).
  • Member of the IFAC Council (1999-2005)
  • Member of the Board of Governors of IEEE’s Control Systems Society (2003-2005)
  • Member of the Administrative Council of the European Union Control Association (EUCA) (1999-2005)
  • General Chair of the 13th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, SYSID2003, 27-29 August 2003, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
  • Chair of the IFAC Nichols Medal Selection Committee (2008-2011).
  • Chair of the IFAC High Impact Paper Award Selection Committee (2011-2014).
  • Chair of IEEE Control Systems Society Fellow Evaluation Committee (2011-2013)
  • International Member of the Committee T3 (Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electronics) of the Flamish Science Foundation FWO, Belgium. (2005-2011)
  • Member of the board of the Section “Meet-, Regel- en Besturingstechnologie” of the “Stichting voor Postacademisch Technisch Onderwijs” (PATO)

International Invitations

  • Invited plenary lecture at the 6th International Conference on Advances in Control & Optimization of Dynamical Systems (2020 ACODS), 16-19 February 2020, IIT Madras, Chennai, India.
  • Invited plenary lecture at the 7th IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems (NecSys18), Groningen, 27-28 August 2018.
  • Invited plenary lecture at 18th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, Stockholm, 9-11 July 2018.
  • Invited lecture at FOCAPO/CPC 2017, Foundations of Computer Aided Process Operations / Chemical Process Control, Tucson, Arizona, 8-12 January 2017.
  • Invited plenary lecturer, 32nd Chinese Control Conference (CCC2013), July 26-28, 2013, Xi’an, China.
  • Invited keynote paper at 1st IFAC Workshop on Automatic Control in Offshore Oil and Gas Production (ACOOG), 31 May-1 June 2012, Trondheim, Norway.
  • Invited lectures at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, October 2009.
  • Invited semi-plenary lecturer, 21st Chinese Control and Decision Conference, June 17-19, 2009, Guilin, China.
  • Invited plenary tutorial lecture, IEEE Workshop Advanced Process Control Applications for Industry, Vancouver, Canada, 8-10 May 2006.
  • Invited semi-plenary state-of-the-art lecture, 2001 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference,  IMTC-2001, Budapest, Hungary, 21-23 May, 2001.
  • Invited plenary lecturer, 1998 Brasilian Control Conference, Uberlandia, Brasil, 14-18 September 1998.
  • Invited plenary lecture, 11th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, Kitakyushu, Japan, 8-11 July 1997.
  • Invited semi-plenary lecture, 10th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, Copenhagen, Denmark,  4-6 July, 1994.

HONORS

NATIONAL

  • Control Systems Award 1983 of the Division for Automatic Control of the Royal Dutch Institute of Engineers (KivI) for the best MSC Thesis in the Netherlands in automatic control in 1982.
  • Teaching award of the TUD Mechanical Engineering Student Association “Gezelschap Leeghwater” for the best teacher in the 3rd year BSc programme, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
  • Best Teacher Award of the 3rd year BSc programme of the TU/e Department of Electrical Engineering, and nominated for the best BSc =Teaching Award of the TU/e, 2015, 2016.

INTERNATIONAL

  • IFAC Fellow for “Fundamental contributions to system identification and its relation to control design”, 2007.
  • IEEE Fellow for “Contributions to system identification for control systems”, 2008.
  • EU ERC Advanced Research Grant, for the project “Data-driven Modelling in Dynamic Networks” (2016).
  • Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2016).
  • IFAC Outstanding Service Award (2017).
  • Journal of Process Control – Paper Prize Award 2020 – Survey, for the best Survey Paper published in the triennium 2017-2019: M.B. Saltik, L. Ozkan, J.H.A. Ludlage, S. Weiland and P.M.J. Van den Hof, “An outlook on robust model predictive control algorithms: reflections on performance and computational aspects”, Journal of Process Control, Vol. 61, 2018, pp. 77-102.
  • IFAC Advisor (2020).