IBM Research scientists receive IEEE Control Systems Technology and Outstanding Paper awards

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Shanghai, China, and Zurich, Switzerland, December 18, 2009—At its annual conference, the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) today announced two significant honors for IBM Research, namely, the 2009 IEEE CSS Control Systems Technology Award and the 2009 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. The awards were presented in Shanghai on the evening of December 17.

IBM Research scientists in Zurich, Giovanni Cherubini, Evangelos Eleftheriou, Mark Lantz, Angeliki Pantazi, Haris Pozidis, Hugo Rothuizen and Abu Sebastian, together with Professor Reza Moheimani from the University of Newcastle, Australia, were selected as the recipients of the 2009 IEEE CSS Control Systems Technology Award for outstanding contributions to nanopositioning for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based storage and other applications.

Simultaneously, in a rare event, the same IBM scientists also received the 2009 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. The award-winning paper entitled “Control of MEMS-Based Scanning-Probe Data-Storage Devices” was authored by Angeliki Pantazi, Abu Sebastian, Giovanni Cherubini, Mark Lantz, Haris Pozidis, Hugo Rothuizen and Evangelos Eleftheriou. Published in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Vol. 15, No. 5, September 2007, the paper investigates the use of control theory and design to address challenges in scanning probe microscopy-based interrogation and manipulation, such as rapid and highly repeatable positioning as well as scanning with nanoscale accuracy and high speed. Although the paper focuses on a probe-storage application, the technology developed is fundamental for high-speed, high-resolution scanning-probe microscopy in general.

Evangelos Eleftheriou, IBM Fellow, manager of the Storage Technologies department, IBM Research - Zurich, comments, “Nanopositioning is a key enabling technology for many nanotechnology applications. High-accuracy, high-speed, and repeatable nanopositioning is essential in a wide variety of emerging fields, ranging from maskless probe-based nanolithography and semiconductor metrology to molecular biology.”

The IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) was founded in l954 as a scientific, engineering and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of systems and control in engineering.

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