Biosketches

Tariq Samad (Organizer and Chair) holds the Honeywell/W.R. Sweatt Chair at the Technological Leadership Institute and is also the Director of Industry Liaison at the Minnesota Robotics Institute, both at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Samad was with Honeywell until 2016, retiring as Corporate Fellow and Global Innovation Leader. His interests relate broadly to automation, intelligence, and autonomy for complex engineering systems. At TLI he teaches professional audiences on topics related to the intersection of technology, business, and societal impact, including how systems and control concepts can usefully be applied. Dr. Samad was President of IEEE Control Systems Society in 2009 and of the American Automatic Control Council in 2014-15. He was the General Chair for ACC 2012, the first ACC held outside the U.S. (Montréal). He was the founding chair of the IFAC Industry Committee and currently chairs the IFAC Activity Fund. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and other organizations. He is the Vice President of Publications for IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society (TEMS) and co- General Chair for IEEE TEMSCON Global 2025, the new flagship conference for TEMS. His publications include the Encyclopedia of Systems and Control (co-editor-in-chief, Springer, 2014, 2 nd ed. 2019). Dr. Samad was past editor-in-chief of Control Systems Magazine and of IEEE Press, and he leads the Wiley/IEEE Press book series on Technology Management, Innovation, and Leadership. He holds a B.S. from Yale University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.

Danny Abramovitch earned degrees in Electrical Engineering from Clemson (BS) and Stanford (MS and Ph.D.), doing his doctoral work under the direction of Gene Franklin. He has spent most of his career at Hewlett-Packard Labs and Agilent Labs, moving to Agilent’s Mass Spectrometry Division in 2014 to work on improved real-time computational architectures for mass spectrometers. Danny is a Fellow of the IEEE and has held leadership positions at multiple American Control Conferences, including serving as Program Chair in 2013 and General Chair in 2016. Since then, he has led outreach efforts from the controls field including a highly popular set of “practical methods” workshops. He is the holder of over 25 patents and 65 reviewed technical papers. For these efforts, he recently received the American Automatic Control Council’s inaugural Babatunde A. Ogunnaike Control Practice Award, recognizing significant contributions to the advancement of control practice (formerly known as the Control Engineering Practice Award). Danny has spent his years in industrial research working with mechatronic control problems and instrumentation systems, from Agilent’s award-winning first 40bps BERT to the award-winning Ultivo Tandem Quad Mass Spectrometer. Over the past decade he has focused much of his effort on how to teach the principles, limitations, and requirements of feedback systems to people outside the traditional controls community including high school and college STEM students, scientists and practicing engineers, as well as the general public. He is a member of the IFAC Industry and Education Committees and chair of the AACC Education Committee.

Francesco Alessandro Cuzzola is an engineer with experience in both industrial and academic sectors. He has worked internationally, including significant collaborations with major companies in software, automation, and digitalization, as well as research roles at the Politecnico di Milano and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. His expertise spans control systems technology, advanced planning, optimization technologies, and data analytics, applied across industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and aerospace. He completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Information Technology Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and has contributed to various European research Horizon projects mostly focused on advancing industrial traceability and sustainability technologies. Additionally, he holds an Executive MBA from the University of Udine. Dr. Cuzzola is the author or co-author of approximately 60 publications in international journals and conferences, with research primarily in control systems, software engineering, and machine learning applications. His achievements have been recognized with numerous awards, including the “Ettore Lewis” award, the “Dimitris Chorafas” award, and honors from the Journal of Process Control as well as the “Danieli & C. Ethics” award. In addition to his research, Dr. Cuzzola serves or served as an Associate Editor for journals such as Control Engineering Practice and the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology; he serves as vice chair for the IFAC Technical Committee on Mining, Mineral, and Metal Processing; and he is a member of the IFAC Industry Committee.

Bhagyesh Patil holds the Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control Engineering from IIT Bombay. He had spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Campus France, Paris between 2013 to 2015. From 2015 to 2018 he worked as the Research Fellow for the National Research Foundation in Singapore for Technological Advancement of Electricity Grids in Singapore. He also had short stints as Research Associate with Reactor Control Division with Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), Trombay and visiting Professor in University of Lille, France between 2007 to 2017. Since November 2018, he has been with John Deere Enterprise Technology & Engineering Centre, Pune, where he is currently leads the Advanced Controls and Operations Research Competencies. He was the General Chair of the Special Session on “CP, Optimization, & Power System Management” at the 24 th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming held in Lyon, France, 2018. His immediate areas of interests are Off-highway Product Control Systems, Engine Power Systems, Hybrid Electric Vehicles, and Smart Connected Factory Operations planning. He is a member of the IFAC Industry Committee.

Bill Tubbs is a management consultant and process optimization specialist. His goal is to play a leadership role in the transformation of industrial operations. He is interested in organizational learning and technological progress, and in the sustainability and environmental impact of industrial processes that use energy and materials. He has eight years of experience in implementing operational excellence in oil and gas, and chemicals manufacturing. He holds a master’s degree in resource and environmental management, specializing in environmental economics and climate policy analysis, and a second master’s degree in control engineering, specializing in data-driven and model-based process optimization. His areas of expertise include data-driven production optimization, operational excellence, energy efficiency, and dynamic process optimization. He serves on the Executive Subcommittee of the IFAC Industry Committee.