Bassam Bamieh - "An introduction to control theory and engineering"

Recording of the speaker's talk at the Barcelona Brain and Technology Summer School, September 2012. The speaker also gave a tutorial, offered on this site.

"I will give a broad introduction to the theory of modeling and design of man-made automatic control systems. Two aspects of this broad subject will be emphasized. The first is how dynamical modeling of a system in order to control it enables a unified point of view of seemingly disparate fields from chemical and biochemical reaction networks to sensorimotor control to airplane flight. The second aspect that will be emphasized is the role of sensory feedback in overcoming uncertainty in the operating environment. While feedback allows for added robustness in uncertain environments, there are certain fundamental constraints and tradeoffs that all controlled dynamical systems seem to observe, whether man-made or in nature.  An introduction to the mathematical apparatus of control theory will be given to illustrate the above points along with several examples."