United Kingdom Automatic Control Council

Latest news

UKACC is now on LinkedIn!

UKACC is now on LinkedIn and can be found here. We'll be posting there rather than Twitter/X. Please share and follow us!

31 May 2025

Vacancy: Lecturer in Mechatronics & Control

A Lecturer or Senior Lecturer position in Mechatronics and Control in the Wolfson School at the Loughborough University has become available.

Details can be found here. 

24 February 2025

UK Automatic Control Engineering (ACE) event for ECR

The Automatic Control Engineering (ACE) Network focuses on critical areas of control engineering such as AI & Data, Future Mobility, Clean Growth, and Ageing Society. This is a new network dedicated to uniting researchers and fostering collaboration. The Early Career Research (ECR) group of the network has the particular mission of supporting early career research (PhD, Postdocs, new PI). To allow young researchers to get to know each other, we are organizing four short webinars:

29 Jan: Control in Human Machine Intelligence

7 Feb: Control for Smart and Sustainable Mobility

12 Feb: Data and AI meet Control

26 Feb: Control for Clean energy

Please see the links above for futher details. ECRs are strongly encouraged to attend. This is an initial step to build the UK community, allowing people to get an idea of what is going on. These will be followed up by further activities to connect and support early-career researchers.

22 January 2025

UKACC PhD Showcase Winners 2024

Congratulations to Chengwei Xia of Imperial College London who won the best presentation prize at the UKACC annual PhD Showcase for their presentation “Active flow control of drag reduction using Data-enabled Predictive Control”. Congratulations also to Raphael Schmetterling of the University of Cambridge and Zheyu Ziang of Loughborough University who were joint runners-up. 

The event took place at the Royal Institution on 4 July 2024. More details can be found here.

6 August 2024

A Message from the Outgoing Chair

I would like to express my sincere thanks for all your support during the last three years in my role as Chair of the UKACC. It was a challenge to build up the activities post Covid and it was great to re-initiate the Distinguished Lecture series that was held earlier this month. Going forward, the collaboration with the EPSRC funded Control Network ACE presents a new phase. My tenure has now ended and I am pleased to hand over the Chairship to Professor Will Heath. I am sure you will all welcome him and work to the benefit of UKACC. Thank you again. 

Visakan Kadirkamanathan

20 July 2024

2024 UKACC PhD Showcase - Deadline Extended

The 2024 UKACC PhD Showcase deadline for submissions has been extended to the 17 June 2024. Please see here for further details.

10 June 2024

Vacancy: Associate Professorship in Control Engineering

A permanent Associate Professor position in Control Engineering (with Tutorial Fellowship at St Hughes College) at University of Oxford has become available.

Details can be found here. The closing date is the 3rd June 2024.

24 April 2024

CONTROL 2024 Late Breaking Results Poster

CONTROL 2024 is now welcoming Late Breaking Results Poster submissions. This provides a platform for presenting novel insights and preliminary discoveries, fostering discussions and feedback from the scientific community. 

Please refer to https://control2024.uk/CFP for the guidelines - the submission deadline is 8 March 2024.

6th February 2024

CONTROL 2024 Registration Open

The University of Southampton is please announced that the CONTROL 2024 registration site is now open: go.soton.ac.uk/fso.

Each full registration allows to upload 2 final papers maximum. Each student registration allows to upload up to 1 final paper.  

Both full and student registrations include refreshments, lunch, and a banquet ticket. Extra banquet tickets can be added at an extra cost of £60/person during the booking process.

More details can be found here.

6th February 2024

L4DC 2024 Conference

The 6th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference will be held at the University of Oxford on 15-17 July 2024.

The call for papers is now open and further details can be found on the event website.

26th November 2023

UKACC PhD Showcase Winners 2023

Congratulations to Hang Wang (University of Oxford) and Jad Webbeh (Imperial College London), who gave the best presentation and runner-up at the UKACC PhD Showcase on 20 October 2023. 

The event also celebrated the life and career of Professor Roger Goodall, with talks from Professor Roger Dixon (University of Birmingham) and Professor John Pearson (Loughborough University, Rolls Royce). 

More details can be found here.

31st October 2023

EECI IGSC 2024 

The European Embedded Control Institute (EECI) have announced their International Graduate School on Control (IGSC) Program for 2024 including modules at the University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford. 

Further details can be found on their website.

30th October 2023

7th IFAC ACNDC 2024 

IFAC ACNDC 2024, the 7th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Control of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos (previously known as IFAC CHAOS) will be held in London 5-7 June 2024.

Details can be found here. 

17 September 2023

Vacancy: Research Associate in SciML at Newcastle University 

A Research Associate position in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) at Newcastle University has become available.

Details can be found here. 

24 October 2023

CONTROL 2024 Deadline Extensions

We will be extending the submission deadlines for CONTROL 2024 as follows: 

Invited Session Proposals: 8 October 2023

Initial Paper and Extended Abstract Submissions:  15 October 2023

Details can be found here.

17 September 2023

Webinar: Why Are We Still Teaching the Ziegler-Nichols Tuning Method (and Other Irrelevant Stuff)?

The IChemE are hosting a webinar with the intriguing title of 'Why Are We Still Teaching the Ziegler-Nichols Tuning Method (and Other Irrelevant Stuff)?' on the 1st November 2023.

Details can be found here.

10 August 2023

Upcoming IChemE Webinars

The IChemE Process Management & Control special interest group are hosting a number of webinars in the coming months that may be of interest to UKACC members:

18th August 2023 - Beyond Limits LUMINAI Refinery Advisor

27th November 2023 - Imubit Closed Loop Neural Network Platform for Process Optimization 

The full list of IChemE Process Managemet & Control SIG events can be found here.

09 August 2023

Obituary: Professor Roger Goodall

1 September 2022

Professor Roger Goodall's obituary can be found here.

Upcoming UKACC events

2024 UKACC PhD Showcase & InstMC Awards Night & Annual Distinguished Lecture 

The 2024 UKACC PhD Showcase will take place at the prestigious Royal Institution in London on 4 July 2024. The PhD Showcase has the aim of bringing postgraduate researchers and the control community together and celebrating the work taking place by PhD students. All PhD students working in any area of control are invited to submit a four-minute presentation on their research (see separate guidance document for details on how to apply). 

This year you are invited to stay and join us for the InstMC Awards Night and UKACC Annual Distinguished Lecture, at the Royal Institution, London. The distinguished lecture “Spiking Intelligence: Towards Reconciling Physics and Algorithmics?” will be given by Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre.

Further details can be found here.

The Rosenbrock Lecture at the University of Manchester

SAVE THE DATE 21 March 2024 - The Control and Robotics group at the University of Manchester is launching the Rosenbrock Lecture Series to celebrate ground-breaking research accomplishments in the fields of Control Engineering and Robotics. Four distinguished world-leading experts in Control Engineering and Robotics will give the inaugural Keynote Lectures. 

The event is sponsored by Quanser Inc. who will give the inaugural Industrial Lecture. Registration is free via this link.

The UKACC PhD Showcase and Roger Goodall Memorial

The UKACC PhD Showcase has the aim of bringing postgraduate researchers and the control community together and celebrating the work taking place by PhD students. The 2023 PhD Showcase will be a tribute to Professor Roger Goodall, who sadly passed away in 2022 and will be held at Loughborough University on the afternoon of 20th October 2023.

Further details can be found here.

CONTROL 2024 - Co-sponsored by IFACx

The 14th UKACC International Conference on Control co-sponsored by IFACx  will be held from 10-12 April 2024 in Winchester, UK.

Further details can be found here.

Learning for Decision and Control (L4DC) Conference 2024

The 6th Annual Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference will be held at the University of Oxford on the 15th to 17th July 2024.

The call for papers is now open.

More details can be found here.

IEEE CCTA 2024

The 8th IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA) 2024 supported by UKACC will take place on 21 - 23 August 2024 at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. 

See website for further details.