During the tri-annual IFAC World Congress 2020, Prof. MA Lei of the School of Electrical Engineering was elected as the Chair of Technical Committee 3.3 – Telematics: Control via Communication Networks.

For more than 60 years, IFAC has made various professional technical activities from theory and technology to applications and societal challenge related to automatic control. IFAC has provided diverse people with various services and opportunities to participate in the various technical events and to present and publish papers, etc. IFAC’s official members are National Member Organizations which represent countries. But individuals can become “affiliates”, which are personal members in IFAC.

IFAC TC3.3 addresses systems integrating methods of remote control and cooperative communication for remote applications, such as tele-presence, tele-operation, tele-maintenance, tele-diagnosis, remote sensor data acquisition. Specific emphasis is on application areas including tele-medicine, tele-education, traffic control, robots for hazardous environments, remote industrial automation, maritime and aerospace systems, automotive systems and smart homes. Telematics applications benefit from increasing capabilities in Web technology, telecommunication, machine-to-machine communication, and information processing. The concepts of Cyber Physical Systems, Industrial Internet and of Internet of Things enlarge the scope of classical remote control.

(IFAC introduction taken from the official website: https://www.ifac-control.org/about and https://www.ifac-control.org/structure/areas )