Wei Lin, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in recognition of his contributions to nonlinear control systems.
Fellowship is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. IEEE fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.
Lin’s pioneering work lies in the development of a non-smooth feedback framework for the control of physical systems such as renewable energy, power systems and smart grid, which are inherently nonlinear and may not be controlled, even locally, by any linear or smooth feedback. Since 1998, Lin has made a series of breakthroughs by developing innovative methods for the control of genuinely nonlinear systems, and then proceeded to tackle a wide range of important yet challenging problems such as homogeneous observer design, global and semi-global output feedback control of non-uniformly observable systems, output tracking, finite-time control and adaptive regulation of nonlinearly parameterized systems by state and/or output feedback. Lin’s work has not only complemented nonlinear control theory but also opened new directions for subsequent research in the field, and significantly advanced the state-of-the-art of non-smooth control theory.
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