An inspiring seminar titled "Are We in Control?" was held on the 15th May in the DEEE seminar room. The guest speaker, was Professor Bijoy K. Ghosh, a renowned expert in Control and Neuroscience (Mathematics and Statistics) from Texas Tech University, USA, and shared his knowledge and expertise on the topic from a mathematical perspective.

In the seminar, Prof. Ghosh introduced the role of feedback control developed over the last century addressing problems that centered around 'stabilizing a dynamical system', and how mathematics, particularly Algebra and Complex Variables, played a dominant role. While the basic problem was deeply rooted in Engineering, stemming from Aerospace, Robotics, Cyberphysics, and more recently Multi-Agent Control, he introduced the pioneering contributions of Nyquist and Kalman, who shaped the field of Linear Control Theory until around the mid to late sixties. During the Eighties, Control Science emerged in the direction of 'nonlinear control', and in the talk, Prof. Ghosh touched upon the contributions of Brockett and Isidori. The seminar concluded by describing how the ever-growing field of control theory had affected Robotics, Machine Vision, and Neuroscience.

A Short Biography: Bijoy received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University, MA USA in 1983. From 1983 to 2007 Bijoy was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA, where he was a Professor and Director of the Center for BioCybernetics and Intelligent Systems. Currently he is the Dick and Martha Brooks Regents Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA. He received the D. P. Eckmann award in 1988 from the American Automatic Control Council, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences Invitation Fellowship in 1997, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Invitation Fellowship in 2016 and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Distinguished Visiting Professorship in 2016. He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2000 and a Fellow of the International Federation on Automatic Control in 2014. Bijoy had held visiting positions at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Osaka University, Japan, University of Padova in Italy, Royal Institute of Technology and Institut Mittag-Leffler, Stockholm, Sweden, Yale University, USA and Technical University of Munich, Germany. Bijoy's current research interest is in BioMechanics, Cyberphysical Systems and Machine Learning and Data Driven Control with Multiple Agents.