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FROM THE EDItOR
Guide for Prospective Authors for IEEE Control Systems Magazine
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his column is a call for submissions to IEEE Control Systems Magazine (CSM). CSM has moved to a Web-based manuscript management system, and new submissions should be through that Web site [1]. The Webbased management system is the same system used by IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, IEEE Multiconference on Systems and Control, and the American Control Conference, so most contributing authors should be familiar with the system. For prospective authors unfamiliar with the system, PaperPlaza has extensive help pages on its Web site. Most unsolicited submissions to CSM are in the form of feature articles or applications of control. These as well as all other submissions to CSM should be accessible to a wide audience. Feature articles usually provide a tutorial perspective on an application area and use numerical or experimental examples to illustrate key ideas. Authors should feel free to offer critical assessments, even when somewhat subjective, as long as the assessments are factually supported. Survey articles are also encouraged, with the requirement that these have a heavy tutorial content, in contrast to a review that just consists of one-sentence summaries of papers. It is more valuable to provide a perspective on the literature rather than attempt to cite and summarize every paper on a particular topic. Most feature articles are focused on a particular class of applications; however, occasionally articles are published that consider a particular Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2012.2225912
Date of publication: 17 January 2013
class of systems and control theory. The applications-oriented articles would usually present experimental data or results for highly realistic simulation models. The more theoretical articles should have a clear connection between control theory and its application, and control theories are generally preferred that have a high potential for having an impact in applications. Feature articles should be written so that readers who are not familiar with the topic will be able to learn about the
connection to the literature and some introduction but typically does not have as much tutorial content or broad perspective as would be expected in a feature article. A focus on a very narrow application can be appropriate, as a good control engineer can solve a control problem arising in one particular application by applying a technique developed for, or lesson learned from, a different application. On the other hand, a submission on a narrowly focused applications area
This editorial column is a call for submissions to IEEE Control Systems Magazine. issues, ideas, and techniques. Highly technical papers that derive new theory or develop new control algorithms are not good fits for CSM; such papers should be submitted to research journals instead. The focus of CSM is on presenting an application, application area, or applications-relevant theory in a form that is accessible to a broader audience. The inclusion of related technical material, digressions, definitions of specialized technical terms, and mini-tutorials are encouraged, and can be placed in “sidebars,” which are selfcontained boxes. Sidebars are attractive and make articles more readable. Informative figures, photographs, and graphics are encouraged. Submissions for the “Applications of Control” column are more weighted toward describing a particular experimental application of control engineering. The text should provide some
6 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » FEBRUARY 2013
should minimize specialized jargon and not use undefined terms. For any application, the manuscript should present information in such a manner that the reader can clearly understand what the control application problem is, why the control application problem is important, what the control challenges are, why a particular approach was taken for addressing the control problem, and what was discovered from the control application. Industrial applications are encouraged. CSM also receives submissions in the form of “Lecture Notes.” Typically this section contains a relatively short set of materials that a control lecturer has found to be useful in teaching students some aspect of control theory or application. “Lecture Notes” can be written from the perspective of the lecturer to the students or can be written from the perspective of the
lecturer to other lecturers so as to include advice on how to best maximize student learning. The “Focus on Education” column has a broader purview, ranging from detailed descriptions of experiments found to be used in a control teaching laboratory to columns that point to publicly available materials that are useful for teaching. For control experiments, enough information should be provided so that a reader can build the experiment and sample results should be shown to illustrate how the experiment can be used in a teaching laboratory. For either the “Lecture Notes” or “Focus
on Education” columns, the learning objectives should be clear. Occasionally CSM receives submissions that describe some aspect of the history of control, which appear in the “Historical Perspectives” column. CSM also receives submissions to “Ask the Experts,” which provides answers to control engineering questions that are typically posed by students but can be posed by anyone in the control community. “Feedback” (letters to the editor) covers a wider spectrum of brief submissions, usually from a reader in response to an article or column published in CSM.
There is no official article length for submissions to CSM. Each manuscript is judged by its value per page to the readers. Members of the community interested in submitting an article or other type of contribution are encouraged to e-mail their idea to
[email protected] first.
Reference [1] https://css.paperplaza.net/conferences/ scripts/start.pl
Richard D. Braatz
Group Intelligence
A
group may have more group information or less group information than its members. A group of non-social animals, temporarily assembled, contains very little group information, even though its members may possess much information as individuals. This is because very little that one member does is noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes further in the group. On the other hand, the human organism contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual. —From Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener, John Wiley & Sons, 1948.
On Control, Operations, and Mathematics
T
he feasible operation and the effective control of large and complex systems constitute two of the central themes of our tumultuous times. Although considerable time, human and computer resources, and intellectual effort have already been devoted to their study, one can foresee that their dominating position in contemporary application and research will be maintained and even accentuated. As always, the nexus of problems of social, economic and scientific import creates its associated host of novel, intriguing and formidable mathematical problems. A number of these questions may be profitably contemplated and treated with the aid of the existing mathematical theory of control processes. Many, however, require further elaborations and extensions of this theory; many more appear to require new theoretical developments. —From Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Control Processes, Volume II, by Richard E. Bellman, Academic Press, 1971.
FEBRUARY 2013 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 7
