Prof. A. Stephen Morse's Perspectives on Control at Purdue

Prof. A. Stephen Morse

Professor, Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Yale University

PhD from Purdue University (1967)

It was not so much understanding powered flight as it was understanding controlled powered flight, which got the Wright Brothers into the air first.

Stephen Morse credits his formative years at Purdue in "one of the best control groups in the country" as a key foundational component of his professional life. Morse, professor at Yale University’s Department of Electrical Engineering since 1970, recalls, "It was during the early stages of the space program, shortly after Sputnik had been launched, when I came to Purdue as a PhD candidate. At that time, in 1963, there was a tremendous amount of space-related research underway on campus as well as throughout the country." As a graduate student, he would leave a "box full of punched computer cards" to be processed on Purdue’s mainframe computer which was then an IBM 7094; the turnaround time for processing was about a day. "Trouble-shooting programs was a nightmare," he remembers.

At that time, Purdue’s internationally recognized automatic control group was led by John "Jack" Gibson who was also Morse’s PhD advisor. After Gibson left Purdue, Violet Haas became Morse’s advisor.

Morse is widely recognized in his field and is the recipient of numerous awards, including Best Technical Paper for a paper presented at the 1970 Joint Automatic Control Conference with W. M. Wonham, a 1992 Purdue postdoctoral fellow. The paper, entitled "Decoupling and pole assignment in linear multivariable systems: A geometric approach," was recently cited by the IEEE Control Systems Society as one of the 25 most influential papers published in the field of automatic control in the twentieth century. He is the 1999 recipient of the IEEE Technical Field Award for Control Systems, an award that is the most prestigious form of recognition one can receive worldwide for research contributions to the field of automatic control, and he was among 74 new members elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002, one of the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer in the United States.

"Automatic control has been called both the ubiquitous technology and the invisible technology," Morse says. "It is needed to keep a huge number of things running smoothly, but only when it fails to do its job do people become aware of its existence. Automatic control also regularly wins the LUT (least understood technology) award. Ask any control researcher what his parents think he does for a living. Ask any control faculty member what his dean thinks he does for a living. Some say that automatic control is the home of "feedback," you know, that concept Lee de Forest had trouble explaining under cross-examination in one of the famous patent fights with Edwin Armstrong over who came up with regenerative feedback.

"It was not so much understanding powered flight as it was understanding controlled powered flight, which got the Wright Brothers into the air first. In the years to come, automatic control will no doubt continue to be invisible, ubiquitous and the least understood technology—it will also continue to serve mankind in a huge number of ways and to provide exciting challenges as researchers and practicing engineers apply it to new problems in a variety of rapidly growing fields, such as embedded systems, sensor networks and bio-technology."

Morse and his wife of 12 years, Karin Brinkman, an RN and Holland native, live in Connecticut. His advice to young engineers is, "Life has its bumps. Don’t give up."