Controls as a Force for Good [President’s Message]

The big, defining questions of our time, such as “How do we leave a viable environment for our grandchildren?”, “How do we get effective and affordable medical care to all corners of the planet?”, or “How do we use artificial intelligence and robotics to create societies that work for everyone?” require a multidisciplinary approach. However, control theory as a scientific discipline has its fingerprints all over those questions. As such, it is our responsibility to make sure that our tools and techniques transition out of our classrooms and conference venues and have a positive impact on our local and global communities. One example of this is the Empower a Billion Lives competition, where the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) partnered with the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) for the second version of the competition through the usage of the newly established CSS Fund. This is a great example of multidisciplinary teamwork, the use of controls as a force for good, and our ambition to contribute to solutions that matter at a global scale.