Professor Mark Balas

UW Engineering Department Head To Lecture At 47th Israel Annual Conference on Aerospace Sciences

January 1, 2007 - Professor and head of the department of electrical and computer engineering, Mark Balas has been invited to present a plenary lecture at the 47th Israel Annual Conference on Aerospace Sciences. The conference will be held on February 21-22, 2007, in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Balas is a world renowned control systems expert who has made theoretical contributions in linear and nonlinear systems, especially in the control of distributed and large-scale systems. His results have been important to practical controller design and operation for many engineering system applications.

The presentation title is EVOLVING SYSTEMS: A Framework for Autonomously Self-Assembling Aerospace Structures. Balas will detail a new framework called Evolving Systems that has been proposed to describe the autonomous assembly of actively controlled subsystems into an Evolved System with a higher purpose. Evolving Systems is a valuable new area of aerospace systems control with many open questions. In this paper we use the Evolving Systems framework to examine the assembly or mating of actively controlled flexible structures. We are interested in studying the inheritance of stability in flexible structure Evolving Systems. We consider examples where mating of stable components leads to unstable Evolved Systems. Then we describe a new method for designing controllers called Evolving Controllers, which stabilize components of an Evolving System so stability is inherited in the Evolved System.

The head of the UW Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Balas joined the UW faculty in 2004. He previously was a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He also served as a senior research scientist with the Air Force Research Laboratory at New Mexico's Kirtland Air Force Base. He is a fellow of both the AIAA and the IEEE.

Balas received a B.S. (1965) in electrical engineering from the University of Akron, an M.S. (1970) in mathematics from the University of Maryland and both an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics (1974) from the University of Denver. He is a past recipient of the Tau Beta Pi teaching excellence award, and has been very active promoting diversity in engineering.