Katsuhisa
Furuta, AUTOMATICA Editor for Control System Applications Automatica, October, 1996, Volume 32, No. 10
In the July, 1996, issue of AUTOMATICA several editorial resignations and new appointments were announced. When the July editorial was written it was known that also Editor Yaman Arkun planned to resign, but no successor had been found. Yaman Arkun was appointed Editor for Applications and Computer Control in 1992 after having been an Associate Editor. He saw many interesting papers to a good end.
Applications papers are of key interest to AUTOMATICA. I am therefore very pleased to announce that two distinguished members of the international scientific control community have been found willing to assume the position of Editor for AUTOMATICA to deal with a wide range of applications papers.
Papers on these subjects may be submitted directly and immediately to the two new editors --- see the Information for Authors. Brief biographies of the two new appointees follow this editorial.
Huibert Kwakernaak
Editor-in-Chief, Automatica
Computer programs follow their rules. When my database management system was instructed to sort all AUTOMATICA authors by their frequency of publications, as I did when I prepared my editorial "Cumulative Table of Contents and Indices 1963-1995" for the June, 1996, issue, it did precisely that. The query correctly listed P.V. Kokotovic as the author of 19 papers and P.V. Kokotoviº as the author of 7 papers. The computer could not know, but I should have noticed, that the two entries refer to the same author Petar Kokotovic. Petar therefore ranks fourth, and not ninth, among the top ten AUTOMATICA authors. I am obliged to Editor Chang-Chieh Hang for pointing out this mistake.
Huibert Kwakernaak
Editor-in-Chief, Automatica
Katsuhisa
Furuta, AUTOMATICA Editor for Control System Applications Katsuhisa Furuta was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1940. He received the B.S., M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1962, 1964 and 1967, respectively.
He was a postdocoral fellow at Laval University (Quebec, Canada) from July 1967 to August
1969. Since then he has been on the teaching staff of the Tokyo Institute of Technology,
where he is currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and
Engineering.
Katsuhisa Furuta's research interest lies in the areas of linear system theory, digital
control and its applications, and robot control. He has been interested in the control of
inverted pendulums like the swing-up of a single pendulum and stabilization of multiple
inverted pendulums, which has been used as a laboratory experimental apparatus in many
universities. His group developed in 1977 a program package for computer aided control
system design named DPACS. The package is widely used by the Japanese industry, and
Professor Furuta has been consulting for several companies. He is the author or co-author
of six textbooks in Japanese, one of which was translated into English (State Variable
Methods in Automatic Control, John Wiley, 1988). He received the Paper Award from the
Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (Japan) in 1974 and the Aida Technical Award
from the Japan Society for Technology of Plasticity in 1992. His present research interest
includes discrete-time variable structure systems and the direct design of control systems
from the impulse response.
Professor Furuta is an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control
Systems Society since 1994, and is a co-chairman of the Program Committee of the 1996 IEEE
CDC. He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from
1991 to 1993 and as Chairman of the International Committee of the IEEE Control Systems
Society from 1992 to 1994.He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and also a Fellow of the Society of
Instrument and Control Engineers (Japan).
Professor Furuta has been involved in several IFAC symposia as an IPC member. He was the IPC chairman of the Third IFAC Symposium on Advances in Control Education in 1994. He was a member of the IFAC Technical Board from 1993 to 1995 and a member of the IPC of the 1996 IFAC Congress. Since 1994 he is a member of the IFAC Council.
Sigurd
Skogestad, AUTOMATICA Editor for Process Control and Computer Control Applications Sigurd Skogestad was born in Norway in 1955. He received the Siv.Ing. degree (Diploma
Engineer) in chemical engineering from NTNU in Trondheim in 1978. From 1980 to 1983 he
worked with Norsk Hydro in the areas of process design and simulation at their Reseach
Center in Porsgrunn, Norway. He then spent 3.5 years in the US working towards his Ph.D.
under the guidance of Manfred Morari, receiving the Ph.D. degree from the California
Institute of Technology in 1987. He has been a professor of chemical engineering at the
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) since 1987.
The goal of Dr. Skogestad's research is to develop simple yet rigorous methods to solve
problems of engineering significance. His research interests include robust control,
distillation columns control and dynamics, and interactions between process design and
control. He heads a group of about 8 Ph.D. students and is the Head of the Centre for
Process Systems Engineering in Trondheim (PROST).
The author of more than 50 journal publications and 100 conference publications, he is
the principal author together with Ian Postlethwaite of the book ``Multivariable feedback
control,'' published by Wiley in May 1996.
Dr. Skogestad was awarded "Innstilling to the King" for his Siv.Ing. degree in
1979, a Fullbright fellowship in 1983, received the Ted Peterson Award from AIChE in 1989,
the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from IEEE in 1990, and the O. Hugo Schuck
Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 1992.