Rodolphe Sepulchre received the engineering degree (1990) and the Ph.D. degree (1994), both in mathematical engineering, from the Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium.He was a BAEF fellow in 1994 and held a postdoctoral position at the University of California, SantaBarbara from 1994 to 1996. He was a research associate of the FNRS at the Universite catholique de Louvain from 1995 to 1997. Since 1997, he has been professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Universite de Liege. He was department chair from 2009 to 2011. He held visiting positions at Princeton University (2002-2003) and the Ecole des Mines de Paris (2009-2010) and part-time positions at the University of Louvain (2000-2011)and at INRIA Lille Europe (2012-2013). He is now a Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.In 2008, he was awarded the IEEE Control Systems Society Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize. He is an IEEE fellow and an IEEE CSS distinguished lecturer since 2010. In 2015, he was awarded a Francqui Chair at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
If you enjoy testing the resistance of your interlocutor to non-scientific claims and wrong predictions, ask him to compare the brain and the machine. He might do better if he is not a scientist, but only moderately so. The talk will be by a control theorist, who does not know much about the brain and even less about the computer, but is fascinated by the concept of feedback, both in natural and artificial systems. Feedback is the concept that shaped the development of cybernetics, a discipline that sought to model the brain as a machine. Eventually cybernetics led to the invention of the computer, which became in turn a model for the brain, and turned cybernetics into history. But "cyber" recently reentered the technological hype. A feedback effect?