Professor Pravin Varaiya of the University of California, Berkeley passed away in Berkeley on June 10, 2022 at the age of 82. At the time of his passing, he was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, where he had served on the faculty since completing his Ph.D. there in 1966. From 1975 to 1992 he also served as Professor in the Department of Economics at Berkeley. Pravin was widely acknowledged to be a uniquely gifted researcher, and he made foundational contributions in a breath-taking array of disciplines rooted in system and control theory - optimization, large-scale systems, economics, nonlinear systems, differential games, circuit theory, information theory, hybrid systems, communications, game theory, stochastic processes, transportation and power systems. He excelled at abstracting problems to illuminate their essence, and offering solutions with his trademark elegance and rigor. 

Pravin’s work has had wide application in diverse fields, enabled by his unifying theoretical contributions. He led advances in systems ranging from transportation and energy to information and feedback infrastructures to economic dynamics. His theories of structured and multi-layer control have brought deep insights into the design of automation and control systems for critical highly complex systems including road transportation networks, electric power grids and communication networks. In the 1990s and 2000s, Pravin developed rigorous control architectures for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). He served as the Director of the California PATH (Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology) research center (1994-97), leading a diverse research portfolio on ITS with breakthrough developments in real-time transportation management algorithms, traffic sensors, and communication. In a major contribution to communications, the discoveries of Pravin and his student Andrea Goldsmith using channel state feedback for wireless communication motivated the adaptive modulation used in all Wi-Fi and cellular systems today. Pravin led early studies on offering quality-differentiated service on demand, initially for broadband internet access pricing. Pravin Varaiya also did ground breaking research in electric power systems, ranging from fundamental discoveries related to causes and risks of instability and blackouts to pricing of electricity to management of the grid through financial instruments.

The goal of this workshop is to honor Pravin’s vast contribution to the area of systems and control in a way that he would have most appreciated – by exploring the exciting research agenda on the foundations of systems and control for the 21st century.

This workshop will bring together leading researchers in the area of systems and control who will offer historical perspectives from their domains of expertise and outline their vision for the future of systems and control. They will also discuss the key goals, technical challenges and implementation difficulties that require a joint effort from the community. We believe that presenting these challenging and important problems to the control community in this workshop will be instrumental in attracting new researchers and graduate students to our community. We will also invite the past students, postdocs, colleagues and collaborators of Pravin Varaiya, many of whom are now leading researchers in top academic institutions and industries to share their personal anecdotes.