Call for Papers:
The Brockett Legacy Special Issue Project

Celebrating the intellectual legacy of Roger W.Brockett : a sequence of special issues of Communications in Information and Systems (CIS)

October 22, 2008, will mark 70 years in the life of Roger W. Brockett, an engineer, applied mathematician, and creative thinker who has been the mentor of nearly 60 PhD students. Following the tradition of honoring distinguished colleagues with special publications, it is planned to publish several numbers of the journal Communications in Information and Systems (http://www.intlpress.com/CIS/) in Brockett's honor.  The special issues will be compiled by a special editorial board whose members are listed below.  Concurrently with the publication of these special issues, all the papers which appear in them will be gathered into a single book that will be separately distributed.

The goal of the special issues and book is to provide an archival reference on the current state of the many parts of systems and control where Roger Brockett was either a major contributor or in some cases the originator.  To maximize the value of these publications, the editors plan to solicit and review paper proposals and abstracts to determine how well they support the aim of illuminating and highlighting Brockett's work.  Based on the paper proposals that are received, the editors will request complete papers based on those proposals that are most consistent with the publication aims.  Papers that are submitted pursuant to invitations from the editorial board will be reviewed for technical soundness, but because all papers will have been pre-screened, a high rate of acceptance is anticipated.

Areas to which Roger Brockett has made major contributions include:

1.  The stability of nonlinear feedback systems
2.  Nonlinear geometric control theory
3.  Stochastic systems and nonlinear filtering
4.  The applications of Lie Theory to nonlinear systems and control
5.  Robotics
6.  Formal languages for motion description
7.  Computer vision
8.  Geodesic and gradient flows on manifolds
9.  Information based control and specification complexity
10. Minimum attention control
11. Quantum control

Papers that do not treat any of these topics are encouraged - provided they are related to Brockett's work.

The Board of Guest Editors of the special issue project are

John Baillieul
John S. Baras
Anthony Bloch
P.S. Krishnaprasad
Jan C. Willems

They will work in collaboration with

Wing-Shing Wong, Co-Editor-in-Chief,
  Communications in Information and Systems
Stephen S.-T. Yau,  Co-Editor-in-Chief,
  Communications in Information and Systems

People interested in contributing to this special issue project should send  a paper proposal in the form of an abstract that is sufficiently extensive as to allow for an informed review.  All submissions will be reviewed for apparent relevance to the purpose of the special issue---and specifically for the extent to which there appears to be a connection with the work of Roger Brockett.  The paper abstracts/proposals should be submitted electronically as PDF files no later than December 31, 2007, to

Ms Jenny Chen, Assistant Editor
The Institute of Mathematical Sciences
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
Fax: (852) 2603-7636, Phone: (852) 2609-8068
email: jenny@ims.cuhk.edu.hk,
WWW: http://www.ims.cuhk.edu.hk
  
Abstracts will be reviewed quickly, and it is anticipated that authors will receive notification as to whether a full paper is encouraged by February 1, 2008.