Title: A Special Forum for the 10th Anniversary of the International Journal, Unmanned Systems『无人系统』创刊10周年特别论坛：
无人系统，何去何从?
Chair: Professor Ben M. Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Panelists: (By the alphabetic order of their surnames)
Professor Jie Chen, Tongji University, China
Professor Lu Liu, City University of Hong Kong, China
Professor Yan Wan, University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Professor Lihua Xie, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Abstract: The 42nd Chinese Control Conference (CCC 2023) proudly presents this special forum to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Unmanned Systems, an international journal jointly published by Beijing Institute of Technology and World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, since July 2013. We are honored that the journal Managing Editor-in-Chief, Professor Jie Chen of Tongji University, China, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Professor Lihua Xie of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and two editorial board members, Professor Lu Liu of the City University of Hong Kong, China, and Professor Yan Wan of the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, will join this special panel to share their expertise and experience, and to discuss challenges and opportunities in the areas related to unmanned systems technologies. Through direct dialog with our panelists, we aim to gain a deeper insight into some fundamental and emerging problems as well as future directions in the field.
Professor Jie Chen is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, IEEE Fellow, IFAC Fellow, Professor of Tongji University, and the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Autonomous Systems, the Director of the Basic Science Center of the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and the Director of the Frontier Science Center of the Ministry of Education (MOE). He has received the Distinguished Young Scholar award from the NSFC, and the Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor award from the Chinese Ministry of Education. He serves as Vice President of the Chinese Association of Automation, of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, and of Chinese Institute of Command and Control respectively, and he is Deputy Director of Shanghai Municipal Artificial Intelligence Strategy Advisory Expert Committee. He is also the Managing Editors of the Journal of Systems Science and Complexity and the Journals Unmanned Systems and Autonomous Intelligent Systems, editorial board member and associate editor of several renowned international journals, including IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control, and Science China Information Sciences.
Dr Chen’s main research interests include multi-objective optimization and decision for complex systems, cooperative control of multi-agent systems, and constrained nonlinear control. He has authored/co-authored five monographs and more than 200 SCI journal papers, and he holds more than 40 invention patents. He has been awarded the National Natural Science Award of China (Class II), and has twice received the National Science and Technology Progress Awards of China (Class II). He has also been awarded the Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress from the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation.
Professor Lu Liu received her Ph.D. degree in 2008 in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. From 2009 to 2012, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and then a Lecturer at the University of Nottingham, U.K. After that, she joined the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, where she is currently a full Professor. Her research interests primarily include unmanned systems, nonlinear systems and control, and networked systems and control. She received the Best Paper Award (Guan Zhaozhi Award) of the 27th Chinese Control Conference in 2008, the Shimemura Young Author Award of the 11th Asian Control Conference in 2017, the Zhang Si-Ying Outstanding Youth Paper Award of the 30th Chinese Control and Decision Conference, and the Best Paper Award the 13th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation in 2018. She received the Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macao) from the National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2022.
Dr. Liu is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Control Theory and Technology, and Unmanned Systems. She served on the organizing committee or operating committee of several international conferences including as General Chair of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Real-Time Computing and Robotics, and Program Chair of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation.
Professor Yan Wan is a Distinguished University Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). She received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2001, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa in 2004, and Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Washington State University in 2008. In 2009, she did Postdoctoral training in the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research interests lie in the modelling, evaluation, and control of large-scale dynamical networks, cyber-physical systems, stochastic networks, decentralized control, learning control, networking, uncertainty analysis, algebraic graph theory, and their applications to urban aerial mobility, autonomous driving, robot networking, air traffic management and smart grids. She received research grants from NSF, ONR, ARO, NIST, IEEE, Ford Motors, Toyota Motors, Lockheed Martin, and MITRE Corporation as subcontracts from the FAA. Her research has led to over 200 publications and successful technology transfer outcomes. For her work, she has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, RTCA William E. Jackson Award, U.S. Ignite and GENI demonstration awards, IEEE WCNC and ICCA Best Paper Awards, UTA Outstanding Research Achievement or Creative Accomplishment Award, and Tech Titan of the Future – University Level Award. She is currently a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), and treasurer of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. She also serves as an Editor for Unmanned Systems and a number of other IEEE Transactions.
Professor Lihua Xie received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 1992. Since 1992, he has been with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is currently a professor and Director, Center for Advanced Robotics Technology Innovation. He served as the Head of Division of Control and Instrumentation and Co-Director, Delta-NTU Corporate Lab for Cyber-Physical Systems. He held teaching appointments in the Department of Automatic Control, Nanjing University of Science and Technology from 1986 to 1989.
Dr Xie’s research interests include robust control and estimation, networked control systems, multi-agent networks, smart sensing and unmanned systems. He is an Editor-in-Chief for Unmanned Systems and has served as Editor of IET Book Series in Control and Associate Editor of a number of journals including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and IEEE Transactions on Network Control Systems. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2012–2014). Dr Xie is Fellow of Academy of Engineering Singapore, IEEE, IFAC, and CAA, and General Chair of CDC 2023.
