The DISC application that this spring was submitted to the pilot round of the new Graduate Programme of NWO has unfortunately not been granted by NWO.
In the NWO Graduate Programme, graduate schools had the opportunity to apply for a grant of 800K€ for the funding of four PhD positions, on the basis of a programme that would show the development of graduate schools into a further integration of MSc and PhD programs. The judgement of the NWO jury was that this integration of programs was not made specific enough in the DISC application (think about central selection/recruitment of PhD students, rotation of MSc/PhD students among several groups, candidate PhD students writing their own research proposal). In the finally granted 9 projects it appears that nationally organized schools are not strongly present. For more information and the list of granted applications, see http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOA_7UUDAK
A nation-wide institute that links all academic research groups in systems and control theory and engineering in the Netherlands, ranging from the three universities of technology: TUDelft, TUEindhoven and UTwente, to research groups in Amsterdam, Groningen, Maastricht, Tilburg and Wageningen.
disc has a coordinated research programme and provides an international network environment for researchers and PhD students.
A central PhD program is provided for PhD students in systems and control. It consists of a course programme offered in Utrecht, international summer schools and a yearly three-day Benelux Meeting. Since its start in 1987 this PhD program has become a cornerstone of the cooperation among the dutch academic community in this field.
Controlling the positioning and motion of objects with high speed and ultra-high precision (up to nanometers) is crucial in storage equipment as dvd’s, hard disk drives, in IC manufacturing and in scientific imaging instruments as AFM’s. Without feedback control this technology would not exist.
Industrial production processes in (petro)chemical, food and energy industry are dependent on appropriate control technology for designing operations that are economically efficient, safe, with optimal usage of resources and minimal environmental load. Model-based control technology provides the tools for achieving this.
Future automotive systems will show vehicles where comfort and driving conditions are highly automated while they are intelligently supervised to keep optimal distance and to optimize route planning. In this development distributed sensing and control is a key technology.
Guidance and navigation of airplanes and spacecrafts highly depends on automatic control systems. This dependency is even more pronounced when steering unmanned vehicles, e.g. for inspection tasks, or controlling (micro) sattelite formations in space. Aerospace applications have been important drivers for developing advanced and robustly operating control systems.
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