【Abstract】Engineering Cybernetics was written by H.S. Tsien in 1954 and is considered classic among scholars East and West. In this lecture we try to answer the following question: to what degree did the scholars understood then and now the basic ideas of Tsien and followed through on them. The answer may be a little disappointing: not much. You see, after using the first 14 chapters to review the background and to summarized what was considered “control theory” at the time, Tsien became visibly skeptical regarding its unstated premise: that all control design starts with a detailed mathematical model of the physical process. If this premise were to be removed, what then? What would become control theory? In this lecture we imagine what this field could and should have become, following Tsien’s footsteps, in contrast to what has actually transpired when Tsien’s vision was ignored by and large.

【CV】Prof. Zhiqiang Gao. Zhiqiang Gao received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1990 and has taught at Cleveland State University even since. Faced with ever widening chasm between control theory and practice, Dr. Gao returned to the roots of controls by collaborating extensively with engineers at NASA and industry in solving real world problems, from which the foundation and authenticity of research were rebuilt. A chance meeting and brief discussion with Prof. Jingqing Han in 1995 led Dr. Gao to switch research direction to active disturbance rejection control, and to nurture it from its early, conceptual stage to a maturing and emerging industrial control technology today. In doing so, he made an obscure idea clear and a complex controller easily implementable and tuned in an industrial machinery, often with staggering improvements in performance or energy saving. Adopting the philosophy of experimental science in research and a humanistic touch in teaching, Dr. Gao and his team bring creative solutions to the real world and vitality of thinking to the young minds. Dr. Gao’s research and teaching materials can be found at http://cact.csuohio.edu