[cmath] 2013 CAIMS/PIMS Early Career Award in Applied Mathematics: Serdar Yuksel

[Kiernan, Clare]

CAIMS and PIMS are pleased to announce that Prof. Serdar Yuksel of Queen's University has been awarded the 2013 CAIMS/PIMS Early Career Award in Applied Mathematics. Prof. Yuksel received his MSc in 2003 and PhD in 2006, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under the supervision of Tamer Basar. Subsequently, he did postdoctoral work at Yale University, and currently is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Prof. Yuksel was cited "for his contributions to the areas of information and control theory, and the interface between these. "Professor Yuksel's main contributions are in two areas. In the first instance, he has made fundamental contributions to the study of control of systems under information constraints.  He has developed a framework in which the factors that govern the feasibility of control systems with unreliability in data transfer are laid bare, and has designed effective control laws that can be shown to work. His second area of key contributions is in decentralized control, i.e. situations in which one has many agents whose behaviour one is trying to control, but in which agents do not communicate fully with one another, and/or some do not communicate at all.  In this instance, Professor Yuksel has provided a framework for evaluating the extent and type of information that must be transmitted in order that the desired group behaviour can be achieved.
 
The award consists of a cash prize of $1,000 and a commemorative plaque that will be presented at the CAIMS Annual Meeting in Quebec City in June 2013. Prof. Yuksel will deliver a plenary lecture at the meeting as part of the award ceremony.