Technical Program Overview


Welcome to the 2020 American Control Conference. We are excited to bring together control researchers from a range of disciplines to discuss theoretical developments of common interest and diverse applications in engineering and science. This year we are proud to feature a new presentation format in the morning Rapid Interactive (RI) sessions. On each of the three mornings of the conference, there will be two parallel RI sessions. The intent of the RI sessions is to increase the visibility of your work and to promote more in-depth discussions and interactions between authors and conference attendees. Specifically, each presenter in an RI session will be presenting to a large audience of half the conference. Each of the six sessions will begin with a keynote presentation, selected from the highly rated contributed papers. Next, 21 papers will be presented back-to-back in a rapid three-minute format. In the subsequent interactive portion of the session, authors will further share their ideas and results through a digital poster session, with large monitors provided for each presenter to promote discussion and engagement with the audience. The six RI sessions are entitled Optimization and Optimal Control, Control of Energy and

Automotive Systems, Predictive Control, Control of Robotic Systems, Learning, and Control of Biological and Aerospace Systems. The conference will also feature five plenary seminars: three morning plenaries, as well as two evening plenaries on Tuesday and Wednesday, with diverse topics on control in science and engineering. The plenary programs commence with a plenary lecture on Control Challenges for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), by Dennis Coyne, and wraps up with the Friday morning plenary by Eckman Award winner Na Li on Distributed Decision Making in Network Systems.

The 2020 ACC received 1239 paper submissions, 46 invited session proposals, 5 tutorial session proposals, and 11 pre-conference workshop proposals. After a tremendous and conscientious effort by the Society Review Chairs, the Associate Editors, and the Program Committee, together with the eleven auditors and all of the reviewers, 835 papers were selected for presentation at the conference, for an acceptance rate of 67%. In addition, 27 papers were nominated for the Student Best Paper Competition. This year the papers were reviewed in a double-blind process to reduce bias in evaluation. We encourage you to attend the Student Best Paper Session on Wednesday from 4-6 pm to hear the presentations of the five outstanding finalists for the award. Also, we encourage you to engage with the poster presenters in our Late-Breaking Results poster session, during the breaks throughout the conference.

The program was assembled in Atlanta in January, thanks to the dedication of Amir Aghdam, Santosh Devasia, Kam Leang, Ardalan Vahidi, George Chiu, Kristi Morgansen, Bonnie Ferri and Fumin Zhang, as well as the sacrifice of a large number of Post-Its. Amir's attention to detail is remarkable, and when he finally approved the program schedule, we all were confident that it was time to celebrate. The Operating Committee for the ACC has been dedicated and effective, and I appreciate their contributions to assemble all the critical pieces into the complex conference system. You can find their names in the final program and on the conference website. Please do thank them for their service when you see them online. I also gratefully acknowledge our General Chair Santosh Devasia for his leadership and vision, as well as his cheerfulness at all times.

Many thanks for your dedication to the 2020 American Control Conference, and enjoy the conference!

Martha Grover
Program Chair, 2020 American Control Conference