William S. Levine

Professor, Control Engineering
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Affiliate, Institute for Systems Research

Office 2369 AV Williams Building

Mailing address
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
2369 AV Williams Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

 

 

Phone 301-405-3654

Fax 301-314-9281

E-mail wsl@eng.umd.edu

Books

The Control Handbook, Second Edition is edited by Dr. Levine.

 

Control Engineering Series

Professor Levine is the series editor of Birkhauser's Control Engineering Series books.

HandbookThe latest book in the series is the Handbook of Networked and Embedded Control Systems, (2005) edited by Professor Levine and former ISR faculty member Dimitrios Hristu-Varsakelis, now of the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece.

 

 

Biography

Dr. Levine is Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland. He specializes in systems, control and estimation. He is engaged in research on control systems design, on the analysis and synthesis of biomechanical controls, and on signal processing issues related to controls. Current specific application projects include understanding the regulation of posture by humans, and reducing the time required to compute model predictive control signals.

Dr. Levine received his S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Optimal Output Feedback Controllers for Linear Systems." He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society and a recipient of the IEEE's 3rd Millennium Medal. He is a past president of the IEEE Control Systems Society and of the American Automatic Control Council.

He has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, an editor of Automatica for Rapid Publications, program and, later, general chairman of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), and a member of the board of governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He is currently Chairman of the SIAM SIAG on Control Theory and its Applications.

Dr. Levine has many publications dealing with control and estimation theory and their application to practical problems. He is the co-author of the book Using MATLAB to Analyze and Design Control Systems (second edition 1995) published by Benjamin/Cummings. He is the editor of The Control Handbook (second edition 2010) published by CRC Press. He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Networked and Embedded Control Systems published by Birkhauser. He is also the editor of a series of books on control engineering for Birkhauser.

One of his papers, "Discrete Time Point Processes in Urban Traffic Queue Estimation" (co-authored with J.S. Baras and T.S. Lin) received a biannual award as the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Research interests

Professor Levine's research interests are in the areas of application of modern control theory to the study of the nervous system's control of movement and; control theory and its applications with emphasis on computer aided control system design; application of computers and computation to network control; and applications of modern control and estimation theory to biomedical and aerospace problems.

Laboratories

Undergraduate Controls Laboratory

Significant research

1. W.S. Levine, Q.F. Wei, and W.P. Dayawansa, "Nonlinear controller for an inverted pendulum having restricted travel," Automatica, to appear 1995.

2. W.S. Levine, F.E. Zajac, and R.W. Wicke, "Dependence of Jumping Performance on Muscle Properties When Humans Use Only Calf Muscles for Propulsion," J. Biomechanics, vol. 17, pp. 513-523, 1984.

3. W.S. Levine, F.E. Zajac, M.R. Belzer, and M.R. Zomlefer, "Ankle Controls that Produce a Maximal Vertical Jump When Other Joints are Locked," IEEE Trans. on AC, AC-28, (11), 1983, pp. 1008-1016.

4. W.S. Levine, M. Christodoulou, and F.E. Zajac, "On Propelling a Baton to a Maximum Vertical or Horizontal Distance," Automatica, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 321-324, 1983.

5. W.S. Levine, J.S. Baras, and T.L. Lin, "Discrete Time Point Processes in Urban Traffic Queue Estimation," IEEE Trans. on AC, vol. AC-24, no. 1, pp. 12-27 (1979).

Technical Reports

Abstracts of some of Dr. Levine's publications can be accessed here from the ISR Technical Reports Archive