Our network consists of Community Members, Executive Committee (Exec) and Technical Advisory Panel (TAP). The Exec are volunteers who give their time to work with IET staff to coordinate the activities of the community and to organise events and awards. They meet for physical and online meetings at regular intervals throughout the session. The TAP consists of a wider group of experts, previous Exec members and highly respected community members who use their knowledge, influence and contacts to help the community. They interact in an ad-hoc manner and support the Exec and community discussions. The Exec and TAP represent a wide range of industrial sectors, and also help to link Academia and Industry.
As a Professor of Control Engineering at Lancaster University, my own area of research concerns the theory and practice of control system design, in addition to optimisation and statistical modelling from experimental data. I work on industrially sponsored projects in topics as diverse as nuclear robotics, buildings micro-climate and energy management, vertical farming, healthcare and medicine. These examples highlight how our subject is very broad and touches a variety of fields. This makes discussions in our community very interesting in a multi- and inter-disciplinary way, and our core skills can be deployed in a vast range of applications.
To echo the words my predecessor in the Spring newsletter, for many years I have found the IET Control & Automation community a really fun melting pot of interesting stuff and I hope you will too!
All the best,
James Taylor