Tam W. Nguyen

From 7/10 to 7/14, we had one of the largest congresses on Automatic Control, IFAC 2023, which was held in Yokohama. It was the opportunity to meet again with dear friends and colleagues overseas (Belgium, the US, Korea, etc), who I haven't met for a while due to covid.

The most anticipated reunion was with my former PhD advisor, Prof. Emanuele Garone, from the Universite libre de Bruxelles. I was so happy to meet again with Prof. Emanuele, who later came to Toyama to give a seminar on the Explicit Reference Governor. On 7/9, we had dinner with Prof. Emanuele, Prof. Hirata, Prof. Kawai, and Miwa-kun.

On 7/11, I assisted Prof. Hirata, organizer of the session "New Trends in Human-Connected Control Design for Better Social Acceptance," where Prof. Hatanaka gave a talk on "Design of 3-D Operation Support System with Variable Autonomy Via Gaussian Process Regression."

Afterwards, I assisted Prof. Hirata, who was co-chair of the forum "Automatic Control for Smart Cities: Can People Accelerate Control of Urban Systems?". There I met with Mr. Kohno Michinaga, President and CEO of Michi Creative City Designers Inc.

Afterwards we went for a little dinner with Mr. Kohno, Prof. Hirata, Mr. Nagano from the NEC company, Prof. Inoue from the Keio University, and Prof. Wasa from the Waseda University.

Next, on 7/12, I had to present my work on "A Nullspace-Based Predictive Control Allocation for the Control of a Quadcopter Manipulating an Object Attached to the Ground", which was in collaboration with Prof. Hirata and Prof. Han from the Kyungpook University.

On 7/13, I had also a great reunion with Prof. Marco Nicotra, from the University of Colorado Boulder. He was also a former student of Prof. Emanuele Garone. In fact, he was the first and I was the second student of Emanuele!

The same evening, there was the Gala dinner. I could also finally meet again my great friend Prof. Kyoungseok Han. We first met as postdocs at the University of Michigan under the supervision of Prof. Ilya Kolmanovsky. I was also very happy to meet again with Prof. Ilya Kolmanovsky and had very fruitful discussions with him.

After the conference, Prof. Emanuele Garone came to Toyama to give a seminar on the Explicit Reference Governor. I was very happy to be able to discuss with my former advisor. I hope we can meet again very soon in the future.