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Spring 2004 |
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Cover Story
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As a young engineer at the Fiat motor works in Italy, Nicola Elia worked on applied controls for some of the world’s most elegant racing cars. However, pursuing doctoral studies at MIT, he was attracted to the more elusive elegance of theory—specifically, the fundamental phenomena, limitations, and issues underlying systems and controls. Elia, who earned the Laurea degree in electrical engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 1987 and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1996, joined ECpE in 1999. Today, under the sponsorship of an NSF Career grant, he pursues theoretical models for enhancing system design. Elia is especially interested in problems of decision and control with limited information arising from networked control applications and from the design of communication systems with access to feedback.“You design a controller that will work in the presence of an imprecise model,” Elia says, “stuff you perhaps don’t know or don’t want to model. You leave this as an uncertainty in your model, and you ask the controller, ‘Can I still control the model, given this inconsistency?’” Elia notes that robust control theory (RTC) has been highly successful in aerospace and other high-tech applications. However, because communication and controls have often been approached as separate disciplines, engineering has not fully understood seemingly random, but in fact highly ordered, systems of autonomous agents such as flocks of birds, swarms of bees, or even epidemiological phenomena. “Mechanical, economic, biological, electrical—the context really doesn’t matter,” Elia continues. “This is the beauty of theory, which is in a sense independent of context. And being independent, it has a high probability of being useful because it is general for all possible systems. We build these systems, but they’re so complicated that we don’t fully understand them.” As a consequence, says Elia, researchers can no longer effectively study systems microscopically, but instead must abstract and aggregate their fundamental properties in order to better control them. Such levels of control, he says, rely on crossing the divide between communication theory and control theory. “New applications are forcing us to talk to each other, to understand each other’s terminology, problems, and issues,” he says. It’s a principle he stresses to his graduate students and one he hopes will one day make its way into the undergraduate curriculum. Elia is optimistic about the potential. “I think we have an advantage here in being among the first to try to build a curriculum that has graduate students knowing both controls and communication theory,” he says. “That’s what I’m trying to build here at Iowa State.” |
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