Prof. Paul Van den Hof was appointed full professor of Modeling and Control of Dynamical Systems in Electrical Engineering, in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology on September 1, 2011. He delivered his valedictory lecture on Friday April 19, 2024.
In this lecture, professor Van den Hof reflects on his academic career of more than 40 years in the domain of dynamic systems and control. During these decades, control technology has become a core technical component in the development of robustly operating engineering systems. At the same time, control itself has gone through several stages of development to be able to deal with systems of increasing complexity, interconnectivity and autonomy, and to effectively exploit the abundance of data that is available nowadays. This also applies to data-driven modeling, as an important element in model-based control. In engineering education the learning environment for students has changed drastically, with searchable information being accessible anywhere and anytime. So how do we position ourselves in the current era of AI development and how smart will our future engineers as well as our future systems be?
Paul Van den Hof (1957) received his MSc degree (1982) and PhD degree (1989) from Eindhoven University of Technology. He was affiliated with Delft University of Technology from 1986 to 2011, where he was appointed full professor of Model-Based Measurement and Control in 1999, and became founding co-director of the Delft Center for Systems and Control in 2004. In that capacity he led the introduction of the MSc program in Systems and Control. In the period 2005-2015 he served as Scientific Director of the Dutch Institute of Systems and Control (DISC). He has been leading the Control Systems group in the Electrical Engineering Department of TU/e from 2012 until 2022, and was among the initiators of the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI) in 2019. He is holder of an ERC Advanced Research Grant and an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant.
At the occasion of Paul’s valedictory lecture a one-day symposium was organized, where leading scientists addressed the achievements and prospects of the field of data-driven modeling in systems and control.
Rudolf Kalman Award At the occasion of the valedictory symposium, Paul Van den Hof receives the Rudolf Kalman Award 2024 from Prof. Jozsef Bokor, Director of Research of the HUN-REN Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI), Budapest, Hongary. The award is handed out once a year by the SZTAKI Institute, for outstanding scientific achievements in the domain of systems and control. It is named after professor Rudolf E. Kalman (1930-2016), born in Budapest, who immigrated to the USA in 1943, and made seminal contributions to systems and control, including the co-invention and development of the famous Kalman filter (or Kalman-Bucy filter).