Keynote Speakers

Teaching in the post-COVID era: Opportunities for the “new normal” in engineering education

(Monday, July 25, 16:00-17:00)

Bio: Jennifer Case is Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech in the USA. Prior to her appointment in this post she was a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, where she retains an honorary appointment. She completed postgraduate studies in the UK, Australia and South Africa. With more than two decades of undergraduate teaching and curriculum reform work, she is a well-regarded researcher in engineering education and higher education. Her work especially on the student experience of learning as well as on topics around teaching and curriculum, has been widely published. She was the founding president of the South African Society for Engineering Education (SASEE). She is a coordinating editor for the international journal Higher Education and a co-editor for the Routledge/SRHE series Research into Higher Education.

Debora Clever (top back)

Robotics in Industry and Academia – Let’s bridge the gap

(Tuesday, July 26, 09:00-10:00)

Bio: Debora Clever is a senior scientist at ABB corporate research and a collaboration professor at TU Darmstadt. She is working in the research filed of Robotics with focus in Human-Robot Collaboration and Robot Learning. Before joining ABB in 2016 and TU Darmstadt in 2018 she worked as postdoctoral researcher in the field of humanoid bi-pedal robots at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing at Heidelberg University (2013-2016). Debora Clever holds a PhD in Scientific Computing (Dr. rer. nat.), a Diploma in Techno-Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science.

Pedro Albertos (top back)

Some Thoughts about Teaching Control Engineering

(Wednesday, July 27, 9:30-10:30)

Bio: Pedro Albertos, past president of IFAC (the International Federation of Automatic Control) in 1999-2002, IFAC Fellow, IFAC Advisor and Life Senior Member of IEEE, is a world recognized expert in real-time control, leading several projects in the field. Full Professor since 1975, he is currently Emeritus Professor at Systems Engineering and Control Dept. UPV, Spain. He is Doctor Honoris-Causa from Oulu University (Finland) and Bucharest Polytechnic (Rumania), being Honorary Professor at North Eastern University, (NEU) Shenyang, PRC, where he is collaborating in different research projects.

Invited Professor in more than 20 Universities, he delivered seminars in more than 30 universities and research centers. Among them, in Chile, he has been delivering short courses since 1999 at UTFSM, Valparaíso and, in China, other than NEU where he has been teaching regularly since 2011, he has been invited professor at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, in 2015-2016 and Jiangnan University, Wuxi, in 2018-19.
Authored over 300 papers, book chapters and congress communications, co-editor of 7 books and co-author of “Multivariable Control Systems” (Springer 2004), “Feedback and Control for Everyone” (Springer 2010) and, recently, Linear Algebra Based Controllers: Design and Applications (Springer 2020). The Feedback and Control book received the Harold Chesnut best text-book award at the IFAC World Congress in Toulouse (Juy 2017). This book has been translated to Chinese and published by China Press in 2019.

He has been reviewer for many scientific journals and also associated editor of Automatica and Control Engineering Practice and he is the Editor in Chief of the Spanish journal RIAI. His research interest includes multivariable control and non-conventional sampling control systems, with focus on time delays and multirate sampling patterns, leading research projects funded by the University, the Spanish government and the European Community. He also had a strong activity in technology transfer, interacting with the Industry and participating in development projects at both local and international level.

From an educational point of view, he got the recognition as outstanding teacher at the UPV, delivering courses in Control departments all around the world, and publishing several Spanish teaching books on basic control engineering. He is the author of a massive online open course (MOOC) about “Dynamics and Control”, where the basic concepts of this discipline are presented without complex mathematics, being illustrated by examples and demos. Prof. Albertos is fluent in English and French, as well as local languages in Spain.

Brian Douglas (top back)

Don’t reinvent the wheel (Making use of the best control engineering resources)

Bio: Brian Douglas is a control systems engineer at Engineering Media, LLC where he specializes in making complex ideas intuitive and easy to understand. He is the creator of Control System Lectures, a YouTube channel with over 220,000 subscribers and 17 million total views. Brian is also a frequent contributor to the MATLAB Tech Talks video series.

Prior to starting Engineering Media, Brian spent 11 years at The Boeing Company developing satellite and aircraft guidance, navigation, and control systems and 4 years at Planetary Resources leading the ADCS and systems engineering team. He is currently working on Resourcium.org, a free website that streamlines finding, organizing, and sharing existing educational engineering resources.

Jenni Case

Debora Clever

Pedro Albertos

Brian Douglas