• [2008.9] Two Ph.D. candidates at CFINS visited Prof. Ho
• [2008.9] Two Ph.D. candidates at CFINS visited Prof. Luh
• [2008.9] Doctors of Tsinghua Talked about CFINS
• [2008.8] Attending IEEE CASE 2008 meeting
• [2008.8] Prof. Qianchuan Zhao visited Prof. Ho during this summer
• [2008.7] Attending PES 2008 general meeting
• [2008.7.6-11] Attending IFAC WC'08
• [2008.7.6-11] Prof. Xi-Ren Cao was elected as IFAC Fellow at IFAC WC'08
• [2008.7.6-11] Prof. Christos Cassandrasis was elected as IFAC Fellow at IFAC WC'08
• [2008.6.29] The 7th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation
• [2008.6.23] Dr. Mosterman on MathWorks Visited CFINS and Gave a Talk
• [2008.6.21] International Workshop on Emerging Frontiers in Systems and Control
• [2008.6.16] Dr. Qing-Shan Jia attended the American Control Conference 2008
• [2008.5.26-27] Prof. Roger W. Brockett from Harvard University gave a talk
• [2008.5.21] Prof. Zabinsky Visited CFINS and Gave a Talk
• [2008.5.5] Prof. Cassandras's New Duty
• [2008.4.4] Prof. Ho's blog articles are selected in the collection of best and most popular blog articles in ScienceNet China
• [2008.3.24] Three PhD students passed the qualification exam and proposed the research topics
• [2008.3.7] Zhen Shen's Talk at Boston University
• [2008.1.8] Call for papers - Ho-Pan-Qing-Yi Best Paper Award
• [2008.1.4] Prof. Tong started to visit CFINS
• [2007.12] Prof. Yu-Chi Ho was invited to be the Editor-in-Chief of WSP new book series
• [2007.12.26] Prof. Shi started to visit CFINS
• [2007.12.19] Dr. Jia received the National New Faculty Funding for Universities with Doctoral Program
• [2007.12.10] Dr. Bob Hobbs Visited Tsinghua
• [2007.12.5] Prof. Guan hosted the speech of Mr. George David, the Chairman and CEO of UTC, in Tsinghua
• [2007.11.30-2007.12.2] The 168th Tsinghua Forum for Doctoral Candidates
• [2007.11.16] Prof. Michael Fu has been elected as IEEE fellow
• [2007.11.14] Prof. Pravin Varaiya from U. C. Berkeley gave an talk
• [2007.11.8] The extension of our chair professor group approved by the university
• [2007.10.8] The six-year birthday party of cfins
• Old news & events

Two Ph.D. candidates at CFINS, Yanjia Zhao and Mingyang Li, visited Prof. Ho on Sep. 19, 2008, and discussed with Prof. Ho about their research progress in Ph.D. thesis. After that, they visited Minute Man National Historical Park together.

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Two Ph.D. candidates at CFINS, Yanjia Zhao and Mingyang Li,visited Prof. Peter B. Luh at University of Connecticut on Sep. 20 and 21.After that, they had a tour in the campus of UConn.

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(Source: Prof. Ho's Blog)

(See the Chinese Version)

IEEE CASE 2008 held in Washington DC, USA from Aug 22 to Aug 26. Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, Prof. Peter B. Luh, Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao and CFINS students Yan-Jia Zhao and Ming-Yang Li attended the meeting.

Prof. Peter B. Luh presented two paper jointly with Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao and CFINS phd student Jin Sun. Yan-Jia Zhao presented a paper jointly with CFINS student Chao-Bo Yan, Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan and Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao. Prof. Peter B. Luh and CFINS student Jin Sun won the best conference paper Modeling and Optimization of Crowd Guidance for Building Emergency Evacuation jointly wrote with Wang, Peng (University of Connecticut) and Chang, Shi-Chung (National Taiwan University).

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Prof. Qianchuan Zhao visited Prof. Ho during this summer (August 20). They discussed the CFINS phd student admission.

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The PES 2008 General Meeting held at Pittsburgh PA, USA from July 19 to 25. Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, Prof. Peter B. Luh and Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao attended the meeting. Prof. Peter B. Luh and Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao presented a poster paper jointly with Ming-Yang Li, a CFINS phd. student. Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao also presented a paper jointly with Li Xiao, who is a research assistant in CFINS.

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The 17th IFAC World Congress (IFAC WC'08) was held, 6-11 July 2008, in Seoul, Korea. Prof. Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho, Prof. Xi-Ren Cao, Prof. Christos G. Cassandras, Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao, A. Prof. Xi Chen, Lec. Qing-Shan Jia and Yan-Kai Xu joined this event. Prof. Xi-Ren Cao gave plenay talk on stochastic leaning and optimization. Lec. Qing-Shan Jia and Yan-Kai Xu gave talks on their work.

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Prof. Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho, Prof. Peter B. Luh, Prof. Xi-Ren Cao, Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan and Lec. Qing-Shan Jia attended the 7th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation during June 25-27 in the International Convention Center, Chongqing, China. Prof. Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho was the Honorary Chair. Prof. Peter B. Luh was the General Chair. Prof. Xi-Ren Cao and Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan were the Steering Committee members. And Lec. Qing-Shan Jia was the International Program Committee member. In the closing cemerony, Prof. Ho awarded the Ho-Pan-Ching-Yi Best Paper Award for years 2006-2007. The winning paper is: Guo, X., Constrained optimization for average cost continuous-time Markov decision processes, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2007, 52(6): 1139-1143. The winner is Prof. Xian-Ping Guo from Sun Yat-sen University.

Invited by Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, Dr. Pieter J. Mosterman visited our center on June 23. Pieter J. Mosterman is a senior research scientist at The MathWorks, Inc., who is a world famous expert in Computer Automated Multiparadigm Modeling (CAMPAM). At 10:00 am, June 23, Dr. Mosterman delivered a wonderful lecture at FIT Room 1-315, titled as Model-Based Design - An overview and research. The lecture was hosted by Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan. After the lecture, Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao and Lec. Qing-Shan Jia and Prof. Christos G. Cassandras on Boston University discussed with Dr. Mosterman deeply.

Abstract: Model-Based Design - An overview and research

Model-Based Design is increasingly adopted in industry. This has resulted in a need for supporting an enterprise-wide use of models. As such, it has to be dealt with computational models that are designed in many different formalisms, that have very different computational semantics, and that capture the same parts at very different levels of detail or in different stages of design. A Computer Automated Multiparadigm Modeling (CAMPaM) framework is outlined that can be used to support and facilitate Model-Based Design. In addition to recent CAMPaM research, hybrid dynamic systems are presented as a mathematical framework for execution. Paradigmatic and pathological behaviors are illustrated by means of a multiple phase space transition ontology.

Biography

Pieter J. Mosterman is a senior research scientist at The MathWorks, Inc. in Natick, MA. Before, he was a research associate at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen. He has a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, and a M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Twente, Netherlands. His primary research interests are in Computer Automated Multiparadigm Modeling (CAMPAM). He designed the Electronics Laboratory Simulator, nominated for The Computerworld Smithsonian Award by Microsoft Corporation. He was awared the IMechE Donald Julius Groen Prize for a paper on HYBRSIM, a hybrid bond graph modeling and simulation environment. Dr. Mosterman is currently Editor-in-Chief of SIMULATION: Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International for the Methodology section, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and of Applied Intelligence. He was Guest Editor of special issues of SIMULATION, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation and IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology on the topic of CAMPAM.

On June 21, 2008, International Workshop on Emerging Frontiers in Systems and Control was hold in FIT-1-315, FIT building, Tsinghua University. The workshop was hosted by CFINS. The program is as follow:

• 9:00-9:45a.m. Modeling and Optimization for Crowd Guidance in Building Emergency Evacuation. By Peter B. Luh
• 9:45-10:30a.m. Some Recent Research Thoughts. By Weibo Gong
• 10:30-10:45a.m. Break
• 10:45-11:30a.m. Achieving Cooperation in Networks with Minimal Communication: Asynchronous Distributed Optimization and Applications to Wireless Sensor Networks. By Christos G. Cassandras
• 11:30a.m.-12:15p.m. Some Emerging Issues in Systems Engineering. By Xiaohong Guan
• 12:15-13:30p.m. Lunch break
• 13:30-14:15p.m. Derivative Estimation for Stochastic Activity Networks. By Michael Fu
• 14:15-15:00p.m. Recent Advances in Nested Partitions Method. By Leyuan Shi
• 15:00-15:15p.m. Break
• 15:15-16:00p.m. Progresses and Problems in General Assembly Lines with Material Handling. By Qianchuan Zhao
• 16:00-16:30p.m. The Road Ahead - Career Advice for Young Scholars. By Yu-Chi Ho

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Lec. Qing-Shan Jia attended the American Control Conference 2008 in Seattle, WA during June 10th through June 15th. He gave a talk on A Potential-Based Method for Finite-Stage Markov Decision Processes and won the best presentation in his session.

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On 10:30am of May 26th, Prof. Roger W. Brockett from Harvard University gave a talk titled Optimal Control of Observable Continuous Time Markov Chains, in Room 1-515, FIT Building. Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, the director of CFINS, hosted the talk. Prof. Meerkov, Prof. Jingshan Li and Dr. Liang Zhang, who were visiting CFINS, and the professors and students of CFINS attended this talk. The abstract of this talk is as follows:

We consider the optimal control of time varying, finite horizon, continuous time Markov chains. We assume perfect observability and that the Markov chains are controllable through the adjustment of the transition rates, subject to a quadratic penalty on the amount of the rate adjustment. We derive an ordinary differential equation whose solution gives the minimum return function for a wide class of such systems and show how the optimal feedback control law depends on the minimum return function. The results bear some resemblance to the solution of the quadratic regulator problem for linear systems, but because of the bilinear structure the stochastic equation, the details are quite different.

On 9:00am of May 27th, Prof. Roger W. Brockett gave another talk titled Noise Models for Quantum Systems and Controlling for Minimal Decoherence, in Room 1-315, FIT Building. The talk was hosted by Prof. Rui-Xi Yuan. Prof. Chun-Wen Li and his Quantum Control group, the professors and students of CFINS, and some students from other departments and Chinese Academy of Sciences attended this talk. The abstract of this talk is as follows:

Quantum mechanical models for systems with spin are among the simpler Quantum systems to study. Take into account the "heat bath", the evaluation of the systems is governed by $$ \dot{\rho } =- [A+uB,\rho ] + [R\eta (t), \rho] $$, where $\rho $ is a Hermitean density matrix, $u$ is a scalar control function representing the effect of a externally applied radio frequency field and the stochastic term $\eta $ representing the heat bath dynamics. If $\eta $ is approximated by white noise of variance $k$ then the expected value of $\rho $ satisfies $$\mathcal E \dot{\rho } = [A+uB, \mathcal E \rho ] +k [R,[R,\rho ]]$$. These considerations help shape a relevant control problem in the following way. When an NMR experiment is designed for spectroscopic purposes then one is interested in the eigenvalues of $A=-A^*$. When $u$ is set to zero the response with $k=0$ is purely oscillatory and the Fourier transform of the signal it radiates serves to identify its eigenvalues. On the other hand, the effect of $R$ is to introduce damping, in this context called decoherance, making the spectrum of the observed signal harder to measure accurately. In this talk we will attempt to explain this background and present some newer results on the control theoretic description of decoherance free trajectories.

Biography of Prof. Roger W. Brockett

Roger Brockett received his B.S. in 1960, his M.S. in 1962, and his Ph.D. in 1964, all from Case Western Reserve University. Roger Brocket joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 as an assistant professor and Ford Foundation Fellow, working in automatic control. In 1969 he was appointed Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard, where he became An Wang Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1989.

Dr. Brockett has held visiting positions at a number of universities. He has also held a variety of consulting positions from 1965 to the present. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Brockett has been involved in the professional activities of IEEE, SIAM, AMS and Tau Beta Pi, having served on the advisory committees and editorial boards for several groups in these societies, including IEEE's Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and Systems and Control Letters.

Dr. Brockett owns three patents and published four books. In 1965, he received the Best Joint Automatic Control Conference Paper Award, and he was the Recipient of the American Automatic Control Council's 1967 Donald P. Eckman Award for Contributions to the Field of Automatic Control. In 1989, he received the American Automatic Control Council's Richard E. Bellman Award, and in 1991, he received the IEEE Control Systems and Engineering Field Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1991. In 1996 he received SIAM's Reid Prize for his work in differential equations and control, and he received the ASME Oldenberger Award in 2005

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Invited by Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, Prof. Zelda B. Zabinsky visited CFINS on May 21 and 22. Prof. Zelda B. Zabinsky is a Professor in Industrial Engineering at the University of Washington, who is a world famous expert in operations research theory and global optimization algorithms. At 4:00 pm, May 21, Prof. Zabinsky delivered a wonderful lecture at FIT Room 1-515, titled as Incorporating Uncertainty into a Multicriteria Supplier Selection Problem. The lecture was hosted by Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan. After the lecture, Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan and Lec. Qing-Shan Jia discussed with Prof. Zabinsky deeply about optimization researches and cooperation chances between two groups. At 1:30 pm, May 22, Prof. Zabinsky attended the weekly meet of the manufacture and optimization group of CFINS, and presented another two lectures in titles Stochastic Adaptive Search Methods for Global Optimization: Theory and Applications and The Interacting-Particle Algorithm with Dynamic Heating and Cooling.

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Prof. Christos G. Cassandras was appointed as the head of the newly established Division of Systems Engineering of Boston University. A division is a graduate education unit different from undergraduate departments. Prof. Christos G. Cassandras is the visiting professor of CFINS and will visit CFINS in June 2008.

The editorial office of ScienceNet China just published a collection of their best and most popular blog articles since the establishment of their blog pages last January. Here is the URL dexcribing the content and purchasing information http://www.sciencenet.cn/blog/user_content.aspx?id=19800. A total of 11 Professor Prof. Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho's blog articles were selected for inclusion in the volume - the highest number among all bloggers represented. His articles dealt mostly with post graduate education and research methodlogy. These articles can be considered as a sequel of the little red book he co-authored with other CFINS professors - INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF SCIENCE FOR YOUNG SCHOLARS (in Chinese and English, with Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, Prof. Xi-Ren Cao, Prof. Wei-Bo Gong, Prof. Peter B. Luh, Prof. Hou-Min Yan) Tsinghua University Press, 2004.

Three PhD students in CFINS, Zhi-Yuan Chen, Jing Yuan and Ming-Yang Li, passed the qualification exam and proposed the research topics for their theses this morning. Prof. Chundi Mu, Prof. Rui-Xi Yuan, Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao, Prof. Hou-Min Yan, A. Prof. Xi Chen, and A. Prof. Bi-Qing Huang composed the committee. Lec. Qing-Shan Jia was the secretary. Prof. Peter B. Luh also attended Ming-Yang Li's proposal through Internet-Phone. Their research topics are:

• Zhi-Yuan Chen, Supply Chain Model with Both Inventory Stocking and Lead Time Decisions, supervisor: Prof. Hou-Min Yan, co-supervisor: A. Prof. Bi-Qing Huang;
• Jing Yuan, Statistics based Internet Traffic Classification and its Application on Anomaly Detection, supervisor: Prof. Wei-Bo Gong, co-supervisor: Prof. Rui-Xi Yuan;
• Ming-Yang Li, Power Flow Analysis under Dynamic Topologies and the Applications, supervisor: Prof. Prof. Peter B. Luh, co-supervisor: Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao.

Zhi-Yuan Chen and Ming-Yang Li also passed the defense of their Master theses. The title of their Master theses are:

• Zhi-Yuan Chen, Inventory Control for System with Stochastic Supply Lead Time, supervised by Prof. Hou-Min Yan and A. Prof. Bi-Qing Huang;
• Ming-Yang Li, Bottleneck Analysis in One Kind of Job Shop Scheduling Problems, supervised by Prof. Peter B. Luh.

Zhen Shen, the Ph.D. student in CFINS, is currently visiting Boston University. He gave a seminar titled Quantifying Heuristics in the Ordinal Optimization Framework. Prof. Christos G. Cassandras hosted this seminar. The attendees had a lively discussion. More details of the talk is as followed:

11:00 AM, 15 St. Mary's Street, Room 116

Zhen Shen, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

Quantifying Heuristics in the Ordinal Optimization Framework

Design problems in real world are generally difficult to solve optimally. They are complex in many aspects. Difficulties in evaluating performance for given designs and large search space are two obstacles. People have to search for good enough solutions which are believed much easier to find. This is the main idea of soft computing. Various heuristics are introduced to implement soft computing for hard problems. The question is, are the heuristic design(s) good enough? In recent years, Ordinal Optimization (OO) has emerged as one of such techniques in the optimization of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (DEDS). Comparing with many other soft computing tools, one important feature of OO is that the quality of solutions obtained by OO is quantified. In this paper, following the OO idea, by comparing the heuristic designs with the set of uniformly sampled designs we measure the ordinal quality of heuristic design(s). Mathematically, Hypothesis Testing (HT) is employed to establish criteria to quantify whether the heuristic designs are good enough or not, and the Type II error is bounded within a confidence level.

Zhen Shen Zhen Shen obtained his B.E. from Department of Automaton, Tsinghua University, China, in the year 2004 and currently is a Ph.D candidate of Department of Automation, Tsinghua University.

Host: Prof. Christos Cassandras

See Chinese Version

Prof. Lang Tong started the half-month visit to CFINS since today.

World Scientific Publishing will soon annouce the new book series - System Engineering and Applied Mathematics. The editoral board has been formed. Our CFINS Chief scientist Prof. Yu-Chi (Larry) Ho was inviated to be the Editor-in-Chief. Prof. Chun-Hung Chen at George Mason University, Dr. Lee Loo Hay at National University of Singapore and Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao at CFINS was invited to be Editors. The objective of this book series is to provide a medium for publication of new developments and advances in high level research and education in the field of systems engineering, industrial engineering, and operations research. Detailed information will be available at publisher's website soon.

Prof. Le-Yuan Shi started the one-month visit to CFINS since today.

The Chinese Ministry of Education announced the projects to support by the National New Faculty Funding for Universities with Doctoral Program (http://www.cutech.edu.cn/cn/zxgz/2007/12/1194500969181032.htm). Lec. Qing-Shan Jia's project "Ordinal Optimization for Maintenance Strategy Optimization of Large Scale Remanufacturing System with the Constraint of Descriptive Complexity" is approved (20070003110). This is a three-year project, from Jan. 2008 to Dec. 2010.

Dr. Bob Hobbs and his colleagues from UTC visited the Tsinghua-UTC Research Institute for Building Energy, Safety and Control System this afternoon. Prof. Rui-Xi Yuan, Prof. Qian-Chuan Zhao, and Lec. Qing-Shan Jia attended this meeting, together with several graduate students who also participate in the research projects in this research institute. Lec. Qing-Shan Jia reported the progress on the research projects in the meeting, and got good evaluation from Dr. Hobbs.

Mr. George David, the Chairman and CEO of United Technologies Corporation (UTC) gave a speech titled "sustainability in the 21st Century" in the lecture hall in the main building this afternoon. This is the tenth talk in the talk series "the Tsinghua schoolroom of Great foreign Masters." Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan hosted this talk. Over 100 professors and students from the department of automation, the department of building sciences, and the center for public security research attended this talk. After the speech, Mr. David had a good discussion with the audience on topics related to the sustainable development. The bio of Mr. David and the introduction to the UTC are as follows.

Biography of GEORGE DAVID, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, United Technologies Corporation

George David is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of United Technologies Corporation. He was elected UTC's President in 1992 and Chief Executive Officer in 1994. He joined UTC's Otis Elevator subsidiary in 1975 and became its President in 1986.

He received his B.A. from Harvard and M.B.A. from the University of Virginia. He is a board member of Citigroup and a member of The Business Council and the Business Roundtable, and Vice Chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has chaired the boards of the Graduate Business School at the University of Virginia, the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council, the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Fine Arts.

He was awarded in 1999 the Order of Friendship from the Russian Federation for contributions to that nation's economy and especially its aerospace industry. In 2002, France named him to its Legion of Honor.

About United Technologies Corporation

United Technologies, based in Hartford, Conn., is a diversified manufacturer of high technology products and a top supplier of support services to the commercial building systems and aerospace industries. UTC's industry-leading business units include Otis, Carrier, Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, Hamilton Sundstrand, UTC Fire & Security and UTC Power.

The company has a disciplined and proven approach to profitability and environmental responsibility. UTC has been measuring its environmental progress for more than a decade and continuously sets rigorous company-wide goals to reduce impact. From 1997 to 2006, UTC reduced energy and water consumption by 19 percent and 49 percent, respectively, while revenues doubled. As part of its latest set of environmental targets, UTC has set a goal to reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent over the next four years and will invest $100 million toward co-generation and energy conservation projects. UTC is a founding member of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the U.S. Green Building Council, and is a member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

UTC pursues environmental goals the same way it pursues financial and business goals: by continuously improving processes at every level of the company.

The 168th Tsinghua forum for Doctoral candidates was held successfully at Sanbao from Nov. 30th to Dec. 2nd. Thirteen Ph.D. candidates of CFINS, including Li Zhao, Jianghai Li, Yunjun Han, Yong He, Chaobo Yan, Yanjia Zhao, Xin Li, Jing Yuan, Han Yan, Da Wang, Mingyang Li, Qiang Li, and Yuheng Li, took part in the forum and eleven of them presented their work orally or through posters on various research fields, such as optimization, complex system and complex network, intelligent information processing and application, etc. Lec. Qing-Shan Jia of CFINS was invited to the forum and shared his successful research experiences with all the students. Chaobo Yan won a Third Prize of the Excellent Presentation (3/132), and Yanjia Zhao won an Excellent Innovation Prize (6/132) of the forum.

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recognizing the achievements of its members is an important part of the mission of the IEEE. each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the ieee fellow committee recommends a select group of recipients for one of the institute's most prestigious honors, elevation to ieee fellow.

the ieee board of directors at its meeting in november 2007 elevated Prof. Michael Fu to ieee fellow for contributions to stochastic gradient estimation and simulation optimization, effective 1 january 2008.

Prof. Michael Fu is tyser professor of management science in the robert h. smith school of business, with a joint appointment in the institute for systems research and affiliate faculty appointment in the department of electrical and computer engineering, all at the university of maryland. he has visited cfins several times since 2004, giving lectures and doing joint research. he also participated the national collaboration project that cfins received since year 2006 as a foreign member. he received degrees in mathematics and ee/cs from mit, and a ph.d. in applied mathematics from harvard university. his research interests include simulation optimization and applied probability, with applications in supply chain management and financial engineering. he teaches courses in applied probability, stochastic processes, simulation, computational finance, and supply chain/operations management, and in 1995 was awarded the maryland business school's allen j. krowe award for teaching excellence. he was named a university of maryland distinguished scholar-teacher for 2004--2005. he has published four books: conditional monte carlo: gradient estimation and optimization applications (co-author j.q. hu), which received the informs college on simulation outstanding publication award in 1998; simulation-based algorithms for markov decision processes (co-authors h.s. chang, j. hu, s.i. marcus); perspectives in operations research (co-editors f.b. alt, b.l. golden); and advances in mathematical finance (co-editors r.a. jarrow, j.-y. yen, r.j. elliott). he currently serves as stochastic models and simulation department editor for management science, serves as an associate editor for mathematics of operations research, served as simulation area editor of operations research 2000-2005, and also served on the editorial boards of informs journal on computing, iie transactions, and production and operations management.

On 9:00 pm of Nov 14th, Prof. Pravin Varaiya from UC Berkeley gave a talk titled Wireless sensor networks for measuring traffic, in Room 1-415, FIT Building. Prof. Pravin Varaiya is Nortel Networks Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1975 to 1992 he was also Professor of Economics at Berkeley. His research is concerned with communication networks, transportation, and hybrid systems. Prof. Pravin Varaiya has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Miller Research Professorship. He has received two Honorary Doctorates, and the Field Medal and Bode Prize of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science. He is on the editorial board of Discrete Event Dynamical Systems and Transportation Research--C. He has co-authored three books and 300 technical papers. The second edition of High-Performance Communication Networks (with Jean Walrand) was published by Morgan-Kaufmann in 2000. Structure and Interpretation of Signals and Systems (with Edward Lee) was published in 2003 by Addison-Wesley.

Prof. Xiao-Hong Guan, the director of CFINS, hosted the talk. The professors and students of CFINS and ITS Lab, and many other students attended this talk. The abstract of this talk is as follows:

wireless magnetic sensor networks offer an attractive, low-cost alternative to inductive loops, video, and radar for traffic measurement. the network comprises sensor nodes glued to the pavement where vehicles are to be detected. the nodes send their data via radio to the "access point" or ap on the side of the road. the ap forwards sensor data to the traffic management center via gprs or to the signal controller.

vehicles are detected by measuring the change in the earth's magnetic field caused by the presence of a vehicle near the sensor. two sensors placed apart a few feet measure speed. a vehicle's magnetic "signature" can be processed to classify the vehicle type. measurements from an array of nodes provide a "fingerprint" that can be used to re-identify vehicles. the talk will present experimental results.

the key engineering challenge is to reduce power consumption so that the nodes can last in the pavement for 10 years under battery power and can withstand the impact of heavy trucks.

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in the tsinghua university management meeting on nov. 8, the extension of our chair professor group has been approved. please see also http://xxbg.cic.tsinghua.edu.cn/oath/detail.jsp?boardid=2706&seq=69542.

In the evening on oct. 8, the department of automation held a celebration party for the six-year birthday of our center for intelligent and networked systems (cfins) at the unisplendour international center. the theme of this event is "take root in tsinghua, cultivate for six years" ("植根清华，耕耘六载"). over 40 guests from the academy of mathematics and systems science, chinese academy of sciences (cas), the institute of automation, cas, the engineering school of peking university, and tsinghua university attended this party. prof. zhang zuo presided the meeting. prof. guan xiaohong, also the director of cfins gave a brief report on the work that cfins did in the past six years. he mentioned that cfins always follows the people-oriented principle, and gives the highest priority to establish a team of distinguished professors and to train high quality graduate students. cfins has achieved a series of outstanding accomplishments, including that a series of graduate courses won the teaching award of tsinghua university, and that a phd whom a young faculty member of cfins supervised in part has won the national best phd thesis award. the research topics in cfins focus on intelligent and networked systems. cfins not only makes the resident professors work as a team, but also recruit high level faculty members such as the ones funded by the "one-hundred-people program". cfins has received various funding and projects from the national science foundation china, the hi-tech research and development program of china, the united technology research center in the research topics on scheduling and utilization of resources and active defense of large scale network, the united technology corporation in security and optimization for intelligent building, security monitoring and emergency response, and the general motors corporation, just to name a few. these projects and the international collaboration are going on very well, which starts to put cfins and the department of automation in the international academic map. the chair professors also give valuable suggestions to the development of the science and technology in china, to make tsinghua a world class university, and to the development of the control science and engineering.

in the speeches, prof. ni wei-dou, who is a member of chinese academy of engineering, the former associate president of tsinghua university, and professor in the department of thermal engineering, confirmed the great progress that the ho-yu-chi chair professor group has made in the past six years, and hoped that cfins can do cross-disciplinary research on the key scientific questions related to power and water resource, which are important to the national economic and the social development. prof. chen han-fu, who is a member of chinese academy of sciences, confirmed that the chair professors do a great job for international collaboration in the system and control area. prof. lu qiang, who is a member of chinese academy of sciences, praised that professors and students in cfins do good cross-disciplinary research, do problem-driven research, and really hardworking.

prof. ho yu-chi, who is the chief scientist of cfins, member of us national academy of engineering, foreign member of chinese academy of sciences, foreign member of chinese academy of engineering, gave a speech in behalf of the chair professors. he first thanked the leaders in tsinghua university and the chinese colleagues for the total support in the past six years, then emphasized the importance of people-oriented principle and the importance of establishing a group of distinguished resident professors and educating high quality graduate students. he also introduced to all the guests the first monograph on ordinal optimization theory that is written by him, prof. zhao qianchuan, and lecturer jia qing-shan, and is recently published by springer. prof. ho also looked forward with confidence the great future of cfins and tsinghua at the one hundred anniversary of tsinghua university in 2011.

prof. ho yu-chi, who is the chief scientist of cfins, member of us national academy of engineering, foreign member of chinese academy of sciences, foreign member of chinese academy of engineering, gave a speech in behalf of the chair professors. he first thanked the leaders in tsinghua university and the chinese colleagues for the total support in the past six years, then emphasized the importance of people-oriented principle and the importance of establishing a group of distinguished resident professors and educating high quality graduate students. he also introduced to all the guests the first monograph on ordinal optimization theory that is written by him, prof. zhao qianchuan, and lecturer jia qing-shan, and is recently published by springer, and also the booklet on useful information for scholars new to the world science that is written by all members of cfins. these are tangible products of the cooperation of oversea and resident members of cfins for the past six years. prof. ho also looked forward with confidence the great future of cfins and tsinghua at the one hundred anniversary of tsinghua university in 2011.

prof. hu he-ping, who is the associate president and the associate executive secretary of the party committees of tsinghua university, attended the party and gave a speech. he confirmed the contribution that the chair professors and cfins has made in the past six years, emphasized the excellent achievements in helping the local members, educating the graduate students, and international collaboration, and sincerely hope that all the chair professors keep a good health and keep on contributing to make tsinghua become a world-class university.

prof. dai ru-wei, member of chinese academy of sciences and professor in the institute of automation, cas, prof. guo lei, member of chinese academy of sciences and the dean of the academy of mathematics and systems science, chinese academy of sciences (cas), and prof. li yan-da, member of the chinese academy of sciences and professor of the department of automation, also attended this party. the leaders from the personnel office, the office of international cooperation and exchange, the educational foundation, the publisher, of tsinghua university, and the professors and students in the information school and in the department of automation spent a good night together.

the official report on this party from tsinghua university can be found at http://news.tsinghua.edu.cn/new/news.php?id=16366.

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