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Professorial Retirement – American Style
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Professorial Retirement – American Style
I wrote earlier (last November) about European Professorial retirement http://www.sciencenet.cn/m/user_content.aspx?id=47166
This week I attended the retirement party and 75th birthday celebration of Professor Petar Kokotovic of UC Santa Barbara. For people in control system theory and design, Kokotovic is certainly one of the giants of the discipline. He was present at the creation of this modern discipline in the late 50s. I met him in the mid 60s when he first came to the US on a speaking tour. After that he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne (UIUC) for 25 years and then moved to UCSB for another 18 years. His students and postdoctoral fellows populated the entire US universities.
Everyone gathered here for two days 5/28-29/09 of talks and celebratory events. Gathered below are some photos and observations.
1. According to tradition, all technical talks were given by Kokotovic’s former students, honorary students, and postdocs. This is done to reflect the life long career and research works of Kokotovic
2. His worldwide friends and colleague participated in two panels, one of which I took part is entitled – Ideas that shaped the field (of control). Participants are Sanjoy Mitter (MIT), Steve Morse (Yale), Karl Astrom (Sweden), Tamer Basar (U of Illinois-UC), David Mayne (Imperial College, London) and Y.C.Ho (Harvard-Tsinghua).
3. Opening keynote address of the conference was given by Kokotovic’s friend and Nobel Laureate (2000 in physics), Herbert Kroemer on Research and Application – Deterministic or Opportunistic?. Many of the key points made by Kroemer echoed thoughts made in my own series of blog articles on Research and Education of the past two years (The organizers of the event promises to make available the slides of Kroemer later on the event website http://www.engineering.ucsb.edu/~khammash/petar/ )
4. I thought the best compliment to a professor by his student was that of Joe Chow, professor of electric power at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During his presentation on the subject he said that “ One night in 1997 when I was a student at UIUC Kokotovic and an industrial colleagues were drinking socially and consumed a whole bottle of Scotch whiskey in one sitting . They solved the entire problem of electric power distribution that evening. However, because of the good liquor, they promptly forgot the solution the next day. It took the rest of us the next thirty years trying to re-discover it. And we are still working. “
5. Stephen Boyd of the convex optimization fame demonstrated how to handle aggressive questioning during his talk with aplomb and good humor.
6. Interesting tidbits I learned: identical twins can have different finger prints, cloned cat can have different fur colors and patterns from the original. These are all part of stochastic effects in biological genotypes.
7. PowerPoint presentation techniques of speaker never cease to improve. Animation, sound, and video are now routinely used by speakers to enhance their talks.
List of photos:
1. Kokotovic at his ph.d. defense in 1959 in USSR, in Illinois, and in UCSB
2. Celebration program booklet
3. Chancellor Henry Yang of UCSB speaking at the celebratory banquet
4. Banquet menu (a Middle Eastern Lebanese feast)
5. My table at the banquet (with Prof. & Mrs. David Mayne of Imperial College. Can you identify the fourth person? hint: he is another well known control academic from Canada)
6. Participants (try to identify Karl Astrom and Brain Anderson of Sweden and Australia respectively and Stephen Boyd)
7. Four of us, Astrom, Kokotovic, Mitter and me, all born in 1934 and hence known as the Club34ers, together in Xian, China (2004) and this week
Unfortunately due to other commitments, I had to miss the second day of the workshop and celebration. But you can learn and see more at the event website mentioned above.
https://wap.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-235120.html
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