László Gerencsér, research advisor of SZTAKI, received the Rudolf Kálmán Prize

On October 8, 2021, SZTAKI held a workshop entitled "Beauty of Stochastics" on the occasion of the 75th birthday of László Gerencsér, research advisor of the Systems and Control Lab.

The full-day programme included presentations by József Bokor, Director of Research of SZTAKI, Balázs Csanád Csáji, Senior Research Fellow of SZTAKI, István Gyöngy (University of Edinburgh), László Györfi (BME), Håkan Hjalmarsson (KTH), György Michaletzky (ELTE) and Miklós Rásonyi (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics). The presentations were related to László Gerencsér's research areas and covered system identification, experiment design, filtering, probability computation, process mixing, and machine learning. The event was supported by the EPIC Centre of Excellence and organised by Miklós Rásonyi (Rényi Institute), Balázs Gerencsér (Rényi Institute) and Balázs Csanád Csáji (SZTAKI).

László Gerencsér received his MSc and doctorate degree in mathematics at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary. After a brief period at the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, he moved to what is today called the Institute for Computer Science and Control, Eötvös Loránd Research Network (ELKH SZTAKI). He was the founder and head of the Stochastic Systems Research Group (1998-2011).

From 1998 to 1991, he held a visiting professorship at the Department of Electrical Engineering, McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada. From 1997 to 2001 he had held a Széchenyi Professorship with the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.   

In the period from 1998 to 2004, he was an Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization. From 2001 to 2004, he was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. In recognition of his research achievements, the title DSc has been awarded to him in 2000. He was the IPC Chair of the 19th International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems, Budapest, 2010.

He has been the chairman of the János Bolyai János Mathenatical Society (BJMT) in the period of 2009-2021, the deputy editor in chief of the journal Alkalmazott Matematikai Lapok (Journal of Applied Mathematics, 2016-), and a member of the Doctoral Committee of the Department of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2016-2021). He has been a member of the HU-MATHS-IN SZTAKI group since 2016.

The prize is named after Rudolf Kálmán, an electrical engineer and inventor, who died in 2016. He fled to the United States as a child with his family in 1943 to escape World War II and settled there. Kálmán graduated from MIT in 1954 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957. In addition to the highest American honors and international recognition, he was proud of his honorary membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and his association with SZTAKI, where he gave several lectures and had a room until his death.

Photo: from left to right, József Bokor, Director of Research of SZTAKI, László Gerencsér, Research Advisor of the Systems and Control Lab of SZTAKI and László Monostori, Director of SZTAKI. Photo by Zsolt Márkus