Keynote Speakers

Understanding the diversity and heterogeneity of temporal phenomena in dynamical systems often requires explicit consideration of their past evolution. Such memory effects arise in numerous natural and engineering processes, such as transport and propagation phenomena, population dynamics, traffic flow, and communication networks. In these contexts, delays provide a natural way to represent past influences and to capture interaction or coupling mechanisms. In control, the interconnection of dynamical systems may generate complex behaviors, while delays acting within or across interconnections can significantly affect system performance, sometimes leading to unexpected or counterintuitive dynamics.
This talk focuses on delay-differential equation models; the key point is to interpret the delay as a parameter. User-friendly frequency-domain methods for the analysis and control of systems with constant delays are presented, with particular emphasis on exponential stability. The lecture also illustrates how delays can be exploited as control parameters. The presentation combines intuitive explanations, theoretical developments, illustrative examples, and selected applications.

Speaker Biography

Silviu-Iulian NICULESCU received the B.S. degree from the Polytechnical Institute of Bucharest, Romania, and the M.Sc., Ph.D., and HDR degrees in Automatic Control from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble and the Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France. He is Research Director at CNRS and a member of the Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S), a joint research unit of CNRS, CentraleSupélec, and Université Paris-Saclay. He is also a member of the Inria team DISCO and served as Director of L2S from 2010 to 2019.

His research interests include delay systems, operator theory, and optimization methods in control. He has authored or coauthored 11 books and more than 675 scientific publications. He served as Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Linear Control Systems (TC 2.2) from 2017 to 2023 and is the Founding Editor and Editorin- Chief of the Springer Nature book series Advances in Delays and Dynamics. .

An IFAC Fellow (2026) and IEEE Fellow (2018), he received the CNRS Silver and Bronze Medals and several academic distinctions, including honorary doctorates from Romanian universities (Galati, 2023 and Craiova, 2016). For further information, please visit https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/silviu-iulian-niculescu .