KEVICZKY, László
László KEVICZKY was born in
Ráckeve, Hungary, on April 2, 1945. He graduated with a Higher Education
Honors Degree from the Electrical Engineering Faculty of the Technical
University of Budapest (TUB) in 1968, and received the Doctoral Degree
in system identification from the same school in 1970. He was given the
Candidate of Sciences Degree (Ph.D) in design of regression experiments
in 1974 and the Doctor of Sciences Degree in adaptive control in 1980
from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). In 1985 he was elected (as
the second youngest) Corresponding Member of the HAS. In 1991 he became
the founding member of the Hungarian Academy of Engineering and was
appointed as a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of
Engineering Sciences. From 1993 he is the Member of the HAS and elected
as the Secretary General of the HAS. In 1996 he was elected for a second
term of three years ending in 1999. In 1999 he was elected as
Vice-President of the HAS (mathematics and natural sciences).
He had been working with the
Department of Automation at the TUB since 1968, where he became the head
of the Advanced Control Group. In 1981 he joined to the Computer and
Automation Research Institute (CARI), HAS, where he was the head of the
Department of Process Control till 1985. He was the director of the
institute from January 1st, 1986 till May, 1993. Since 1999 he has been
research professor of CARI, too. Since 1981 he has been honorary
professor of Department of Automation at the TUB, where he was appointed
as full professor in 1994.
In 1972 he spent 3 months on
leave at the Lund Institute of Technology, in Lund, Sweden, as a
post-doctoral fellow. In 1979 he spent 4 months at the same institution
under a UNO/UNESCO fellowship. He spent a 9 months visiting
professorship at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, as the
principal investigator of a cooperative NSF research program between
U.S. and Hungary between 1979-80. He was the principal investigator of
another project of the same sides between 1982-85. In 1986 he spent a 3
months Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship in the USA. In the period of
1977-1986 he was the Hungarian team leader in a co-operative research
project with the Krupp-Polysius (Germany) and the Hungarian cement
industry, when advanced adaptive control algorithms were developed (some
of them are even now applied in both countries). During 1993-1999 he was
the leader of an US Army Research Office (ARO) granted project on
"Identification and Robust Control: System modeling for Synthesis of
Control Laws". He was the member of the Steering Committee of the COSY
(Control of Complex Systems) European Science Foundation (ESF) project
(1995-1999).
Between 1981-84 he was the
vice-chairman, then chairman (1984-90) of the Applications Committee in
IFAC. From 1990 to 93 he was the vice-chairman of the Technical Board.
He was the member of the Council for the period of 1993-96 and
re-elected for the next triennial. At the same time he was the chairman
of the Awards and Election Committees. Presently he serves as the
vice-chairman of the Policy Committee. |
His scientific school of advanced
theory of automatic control is very well known in all over the world.
Four of his former students are already professors at different
universities, two of them are division heads. One of them is already
also the member of the HAS. His special fields of interest are system
identification and parameter estimation, adaptive optimal control of
industrial processes, computer controlled systems, simulation and
modeling, intelligent and expert controls, C3I
(Control, Communication, Computation, Intelligence.) He has 308
scientific and technical papers written mainly in English (a few in
Hungarian and other languages). (Four books in English with co-authors
and several textbooks in Hungarian in team work.) The number of
citations is 517. These statistics put him to the first place in his
scientific discipline in Hungary. He was an Associate Editor of IFAC
Journal Automatica between 1987-93 and served as IPC member (three times
as Chairman) of many IFAC congresses, symposia and workshops.
He has been very active in the
Hungarian science system on the science policy level, too. His institute
was the first started the necessary restructuring leaving the
soviet-model based huge but ineffective academical research
institutional form. After more than 50% scale down the CARI became a
very effective and financable research center of excellence. The EU
granted the "Center of Excellence" title to this institute in 2000.
After having been elected as Secretary General of the HAS he played an
important role to develop and reach a new act in the Hungarian
Parliament, re-establishing the original independence and autonomy of
the HAS (lost in the communist regime) and reforming it as a public
society compromising the meritocratic and democratic parts of science.
Due to his initiative, during his period the HAS increased its subsidy
directed to the top research groups of the universities introducing a
competitive periodical evaluation system (contrary to the position based
obsolete one, formed in the previous regime). In this period he
initiated and played a key role in the evaluation and restructuring the
whole research institutional branch of the HAS. The number of the
institutes were decreased from 44 to 33 and the scale was shrinked by
50% during this very painful but absolutely necessary process. This
branch now forms several national research centers of excellence
(physics, chemistry, biology, informatics, etc.) strongly co-operating
with the universities and having much smaller overhead, administration
with flat internal structures and producing 35-37 % of the country's
scientific contribution in fundamental research. The EU granted the
"Center of Excellence" title to five institutes of the HAS in 2000. |
