Karl Johan Åström

Infobox_Scientist
name = Karl Johan Åström

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caption =
birth_date = birth date and age|1934|8|5
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death_date =
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field = Electrical engineering
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alma_mater = Royal Institute of Technology
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awards = IEEE Medal of Honor

Karl Johan Åström (born August 5, 1934) is a notable Swedish control theorist, who made contributions to the fields of control theory and control engineering, computer control and adaptive control.

Biography

Åström was born in Östersund, Sweden, and received his M.Sc. in Engineering Physics (1957) and Ph.D. in Automatic Control and Mathematics (1960) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where he also taught from 1955-1960 while working on inertial guidance for the Swedish Research Institute of National Defense.

In 1961 Åström joined the IBM Nordic Laboratory to work on computerized process control, with tours at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York (1962) and San Jose, California (1963). After his return he led efforts in the computer control of paper manufacturing machinery. In 1965, Åström was named Chair of the newly founded Department of Automatic Control at Lund University, Sweden.

From 1965 to 2002 he was chair of the Department of Automatic Control at Lund University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. Since 2002 he has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Åström is a Fellow of the IEEE, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Vice President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the ASME Rufus Oldenburger medal (1985) and the International Federation of Automatic Control Quazza Medal (1987). In 1987 he was also awarded the degree Docteur Honoris Causa from l'Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble. He received the IEEE Field Award in Control Systems Science and Engineering in 1990, and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1993 for his "fundamental contributions to theory and applications of adaptive control technology."

Publications

* 1970. "Introduction to Stochastic Control". Academic Press, 1970; Dover, 2006.
* 1989. "Adaptive Control". With B Wittenmark. Addison-Wesley, 1989.
* 1996. "Computer-controlled Systems, Theory and Design". With B Wittenmark. Prentice Hall, 1996)
* 2005. "Advanced PID Control". With T Hägglund. ISA, 2005.
* 2008. "Feedback Systems: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers". With R. Murray. Princeton University Press, 2008.

;Papers, a selection:
* KJ Åström, B Wittenmark. "On self-tuning regulators," Automatica, vol. 9, pp. 185-199, 1973.

External links

* [http://www.control.lth.se/~kja/ Karl Johan Åström faculty page]
* [http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/biography/astrom.html IEEE History Center biography]
* [http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/amwiki Åström and Murray: Feedback Systems (2008) [textbook]