On July 9^th, 2025 at 11.30 am the seminar titled "Strong Stabilization of Distributed Parameter Systems" will take place at DEIB Beta Room (Building 24).

Strong stabilization of a plant is defined as finding a stabilizing feedback controller that is itself stable. This problem has attracted interest since the 1970s, and various design techniques have been proposed. On the other hand, finding the H∞ optimal (robustly optimal) controller in the set of all stable stabilizing controllers is still an open problem. A suboptimal solution can be found under certain sufficient conditions. In this presentation, we review existing strong stabilization methods for LTI finite-dimensional plants and illustrate their extensions to distributed parameter systems (DPS). We also present a new family of controllers for unstable DPS and discuss related open problems.

Hitay Özbay is a Professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University, Ankara Turkey. He received the B.Sc., M.Eng., and PhD degrees from Middle East Technical University (1985), McGill University (1987), and University of Minnesota (1989), respectively. His prior academic affiliations include the University of Rhode Island (1989-1990), and The Ohio State University (1991-2006) where he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering before joining Bilkent University. He also held a visiting position at INRIA, France (2009-2010). Professor Özbay was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2017-2019) and a general assembly member of the European Control Association (EUCA), representing Turkey, 2013-2019. He served as Associate Editor for many journals, including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, and Automatica. He also served as Vice-Chair of IFAC Technical Committees on Networked Control Systems (2005-2011) and Linear Control Systems (2017-2023). He is a Fellow of IEEE. Email:  hitay@bilkent.edu.tr