Michael Sebek

Background

About Michael Sebek

Professor of Cybernetics at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Head of the Department of Control Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering. He worked at ETH Zurich, CH; Twente Universiteit, NL; and the Academy of Sciences. He has lectured at dozens of universities around the world. He co-founded and runs PolyX, a software company for polynomials, polynomial matrices, and equations and their applications in systems, signals, and control. He researches and builds automatic control, networks, multi-agent systems, robot formations, autonomous cars, aircraft, and satellites; He has published hundreds of papers in top journals worldwide; his results are widely cited. He leads EU, NATO, US, and Czech research projects and coordinates the department's contract research for Honeywell, Porsche, Volkswagen, ŠKODA AUTO, US Navy, and others. He teaches the popular and dreaded undergraduate course Automatic Control, about which students even compose songs. He has created and led the elite Cybernetics and Robotics degree program. He co-founded the European SpaceMaster program, whose students are at a different European university every semester. He has trained dozens of PhD students, successfully working in companies and universities around the world. He led the European Industrial Doctorate with the Belgian company Siemens Industrial Software. His former Ph.D.s have themselves trained ten other PhD students. He founded the popular RoboCompetition for secondary and primary schools, which is attended by hundreds of teams from all over the country. He has led the evaluation of Czech science results for the Government Council. He is a member of scientific councils of universities, faculties, and ministries. He serves on the board of the International Federation of Automatic Control IFAC; he organized the 16th IFAC World Congress, the largest event in the field in the world up to that time. He has served in various capacities of the Control Systems Society (CSS) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He was a member of the Council of the European Control Association EUCA He was inducted into the Hall of Fame with the Werner von Siemens Award for Best Educator. He has fought tirelessly and fruitlessly to improve the quality of our schools and has been involved in management methods. He likes to reflect on the future and the impact of technological change on society.