Monday 5 December 2022

Skills and Perspectives for Early Career Development

Working Towards a Diverse and Inclusive Work Environment

Workshop at the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

The focus of this workshop will be on unconscious bias, its impact on applying for jobs and recruiting and how to face it as member of a minority group and how to prevent it as leader or as member of majority group.

The objective is twofold: on the one hand, it offers students and young professionals from minority groups some theory and practice for developing required nontechnical skills to thrive as control engineers in academia and industry and specifically overcome the effect of unconscious bias. On the other hand, it provides young leaders from any group with the knowledge and tools to prevent the effect of unconscious bias when recruiting and managing members of a research team.

Expected
outcomes

Provide training and skills to start and developing a successful career in R&D: interviewing, negotiating, networking, understanding group dynamics at work.

Provide knowledge and tools to overcome the effects of unconscious bias when recruiting or managing an R&D group.

Attendees

Students, postdocs and young researchers from minority groups preparing to face the job market and interested in acquiring skills for their future career in industry or academia.

Young professionals from academia and industry interested in acquiring skills to shape and sustainably manage a diverse and successful research group.

Anyone interested in learning about unconscious bias and its effect on working groups and interested in fostering a creative and inclusive culture in their group, department, or institutions.

Program

8:00 AM-10:15 AM Morning session

The interactive session is only offered in person to registered participants. Register on https://css-registration.paperhost.net/cdc22 or at the conference registration desk.

  • Interactive session on how to prevent unconscious bias in job applications: a guideline for applicants and recruiters

  • Unconscious bias in the workplace: the importance of diversity and inclusion

  • Interactive session on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Experimenting with practical scenarios.

Fatima Alleyne, Ph.D., is the director of Community Engagement and Inclusive Practices in the College of Engineering (COE) at UC Berkeley. She brings her passion and love for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and education into her work to develop programs that promote equity; foster a positive, inclusive culture; and increase access and opportunities to those who have historically been underrepresented in STEM. She also led a strategic planning process to guide programs and priorities to advance diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the College. A core component of her work, Dr. Alleyne engages diverse members of the campus community on the topic of DEI. Her work has been lauded by UC Berkeley’s chancellor with recognition as a Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award recipient as well as Advising and Student Services as an Equity Champion Award recipient in 2022. Prior to this role, Dr. Alleyne started her own consulting business and served as the director of COE faculty engagement, consultant for the Center for Restorative Solutions, research general engineer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and education and outreach coordinator at an NSF-funded research center and research specialist, both at UC Berkeley. Her commitment and passion for STEM education has led to her service on a range of committees on campus and in her community, including the development of STEM programs in K-12 schools. Fatima earned her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in materials science and engineering from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in chemistry from City University of New York, Hunter College.

10:30 AM - 12:00 AM Panel session

No registration is needed to attend via Zoom.

Moderator: Saverio Bolognani
Panelists: Juncal Arbelaiz, Angela Fontan, Hideaki Ishii, Karl Johansson, Kristi Morgansen

  • How to communicate the effects of unconscious bias and the benefits of diversity

  • Building a culture of awareness surrounding the benefits of increasing diversity and the barriers to achieving this goal

  • Intercultural sensitivity

  • Use knowledge to thrive: self-awareness to overcome the obstacle of biases

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Juncal Arbelaiz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, working with Prof. Naomi Leonard since October 2022. In September 2022, she obtained her PhD in Applied Mathematics at MIT jointly advised by Prof. Ali Jadbabaie and Prof. Anette Hosoi. The topic of her doctoral dissertation was optimal distributed control and estimation of systems with spatiotemporal dynamics. She was the recipient of several fellowships and awards during her doctoral studies, such as being recognized as a Rising Star in EECS 2021, with a Google Anita Borg Memorial fellowship, and with the National Award for Academic Excellence of the Government of Spain. More recently, she was the recipient of a Schmidt Science Fellowship for her postdoctoral research.

Angela Fontan is a Postdoctoral researcher with the Division of Decision and Control Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, working with Prof. Karl H. Johansson. She received a B.Sc. degree in Information Engineering in 2013 and a M.Sc. degree (with honor) in Automation Engineering in 2016, from the University of Padova, Italy. From August 2016 until November 2021, she was a Ph.D. student at the Division of Automatic Control, Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University, under the main supervision of Prof. Claudio Altafini. In September 2021 she successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Collective decision-making on networked systems in presence of antagonistic interactions". Her research interests are in the area of networked systems and nonlinear dynamics over networks, with applications to social networks and collective decision-making processes.

Kingsley Fregene currently serves as Director of Technology Integration & Intellectual Property at Lockheed Martin. Previously, he was Chief Engineer for Applied Research overseeing a broad portfolio of Research & Advanced Technology Development activities. He has held various roles at Lockheed Martin over the years, including Principal Research Scientist, and Group Leader for Robotics & Intelligent Systems. Prior to Lockheed Martin, Kingsley was with Honeywell Labs, where he had key roles on various vehicle autonomy programs. Kingsley has pioneered a variety of control technologies for safe operation of unconventional unmanned vehicle systems in challenging aerial, ground, and maritime missions. Kingsley was the 2021 recipient of the AACC Control Engineering Practice Award. Other recognitions for leadership and technical excellence include Lockheed Martin’s Nova Award – the corporation’s highest honor for the top 1% of its workforce who have made outstanding contributions to its mission and business; and best paper awards at the AIAA Modeling & Simulation Conference (2012), and the American Helicopter Society Forum (2010). Beyond the technical/scientific literature, his work has been featured in National Geographic: Engineering Inspirations from Nature, a video and workbook series for middle school students, and in the children’s books Tiny Robots (2015) and Mimic-Makers: Biomimicry Inventors Inspired by Nature (2021). Kingsley currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. Prior services include Chair, IEEE Technical Committee on Aerospace Controls; Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Automation Sciences & Engineering; Guest Editor, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and Technical Program Committees for IEEE CSS and RAS Society Conferences. He received his Ph.D. and M.A.Sc. from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his B.Eng. with first class honors from Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria, all in Electrical & Computer Engineering.

Hideaki Ishii received the M.Eng. degree from Kyoto University in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 2002. After being a Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and The University of Tokyo, he has been at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2007, where he is currently a Professor with the Department of Computer Science. He was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Stuttgart in 2014-2015. His research interests are in networked control systems, multi-agent systems, distributed algorithms, and cyber security of control systems. He served as an Associate Editor for several journals including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems. He is the Chair of the IFAC Coordinating Committee on Systems and Signals since 2017 and the IPC Chair for the IFAC World Congress. 2023 to be held in Yokohama, Japan. He serves as a Vice President for the IEEE Control Systems Society. He received the IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award in 2015. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Karl H. Johansson is Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and Director of Digital Futures. He received MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Automatic Control from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Caltech, NTU, HKUST Institute of Advanced Studies, and NTNU. His research interests are in networked control systems and cyber-physical systems with applications in transportation, energy, and automation networks. He is President of the European Control Association and member of the IFAC Council, and has served on the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors and the Swedish Scientific Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering Sciences. He has received several best paper awards and other distinctions from IEEE, IFAC, and ACM. He has been awarded Swedish Research Council Distinguished Professor, Wallenberg Scholar with the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Future Research Leader Award from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, the triennial IFAC Young Author Prize, and IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. He is Fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Kristi Morgansen received a BS and a MS in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, respectively in 1993 and 1994, an S.M. in Applied Mathematics in 1996 from Harvard University and a PhD in Engineering Sciences in 1999 from Harvard University. Until joining the University of Washington, she was first a postdoctoral scholar then a senior research fellow in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. She joined the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the summer of 2002. Professor Morgansen’s research interests focus on nonlinear systems where sensing and actuation are integrated, stability in switched systems with delay, and incorporation of operational constraints such as communication delays in control of multi-vehicle systems. Applications include both traditional autonomous vehicle systems such as fixed-wing aircraft and underwater gliders as well as novel systems such as bio-inspired underwater propulsion, bio-inspired agile flight, human decision making, and neural engineering. The results of this work have been demonstrated in estimation and path planning in unmanned aerial vehicles with limited sensing, vorticity sensing and sensor placement on fixed wing aircraft, landing maneuvers in fruit flies, joint optimization of control and sensing in dynamical systems, and deconfliction and obstacle avoidance in autonomous systems and in biological systems including fish, insects, birds, and bats.

1:00 PM - 3:00 PM Invited speakers

No registration is needed to attend via Zoom.

Francesca Parise

Prepare for a job in academia
How to write a CV, read the job ads and prepare for an interview

Francesca Parise joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in July 2020. Before then, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. She defended her PhD at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2016 and she received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Information and Automation Engineering in 2010 and 2012, from the University of Padova, Italy, where she simultaneously attended the Galilean School of Excellence. Francesca was recognized as an EECS rising star in 2017 and is the recipient of the Guglielmo Marin Award from the “Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti”, the SNSF Early Postdoc Fellowship, the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Fellowship and the ETH Medal for her doctoral work.

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Stefano Di Cairano

Prepare for a job in industry
How to write a CV, read the job ads and prepare for an interview

Stefano Di Cairano received Laurea and PhD degrees from the University of Siena in 2004 and 2008, respectively. During this period, he was a visiting student at DTU, Denmark, and Caltech, CA. From 2008 to 2011, he was with Ford Motor Company, Research and Advanced Engineering, MI. Since 2011 Stefano is with Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, MA, where he is a Distinguished Research Scientist and a Senior Team Leader. His work focuses on guidance, navigation, and control for autonomous vehicles, primarily in automotive and aerospace. His research interests include predictive control, constrained control, motion planning, real-time optimization. Stefano is an author on more than 200 peer-review papers, he is an inventor on more than 65 granted patents, and has held numerous positions in the IEEE Control Systems Society, including Associated Editor of Trans. Control Systems Technology, Chair of the Automotive Controls Technical Committee, Chair of the Standing Committee on Standard, and Inaugural Chair of the Technology Conferences Editorial Board.

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3:30 PM - 5:00 PM Coaching session

The interactive session is only offered in person to registered participants. Register on https://css-registration.paperhost.net/cdc22 or at the conference registration desk.

  • Practice interviewing with a senior researcher/professor/manager

  • Practice negotiation skills

  • Small-group coaching sessions

Organizers

Silvia Mastellone, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland
Roy Smith, ETH Zurich
Saverio Bolognani, ETH Zurich
Dennice Gayme, Johns Hopkins University
Hideaki Ishii, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Afef Fekih, University of Louisiana at Lafayette