A longtime professor at the University of Iowa College of Engineering has been honored for outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of control engineering and science by Automatica, a leading publication in the field of systems and control.

Er-Wei Bai, professor and departmental executive officer of electrical and computer engineering received the Automatica Paper Prize for “Sparse system identification for stochastic systems with general observation sequences.”

In the paper, Bai develops theory and techniques to identify zero and non-zero elements of a sparse parameter vector of a stochastic dynamic system with very general observation sequences. The problem has been a long standing one that has applications in many areas including engineering and medicine. The paper abstract can be found at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005109820303605.

The award was bestowed on July 14, 2023, during the 2023 International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress in Yokohama, Japan. Automatica is the flagship journal of IFAC.

At each triennial IFAC World Congress the prize is awarded to the authors of three selected papers published in Automatica in the three years preceding the Congress. The prize funds are provided by the publisher of Automatica, Elsevier Ltd.