The second session of IST Distinguished Lecture Series took place last Friday. Professor Andrew Teel, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the world’s leading experts in the field of hybrid systems was the lecturer of this session.

Professor Andrew Teel provided an introduction to hybrid dynamical systems, during his lecture titled “An introduction to (stochastic and non-stochastic) hybrid dynamical systems”. “Our goal is try to solve control problems that may be impossible to solve if we don’t add some randomness to the system.”

“Control technology plays an important role in many engineering advances that impact our society”, said the professor. “For a long time, control was only applied to continuous-time systems. But there are many applications involving the interaction of continuous-time and discrete-time systems, leading to these hybrid systems.”

The IST Distinguished Lectures aim to promote Science in Portugal, bringing together professors and researchers who have distinguished themselves in their fields of expertise, and are organised by the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) and by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (DEEC) at Técnico.