George N. Saridis, Founding President of the IEEE-Robotics and Automation

Council/Society, died October 29 in his home in Athens, Greece. From 1981 until

his retirement, Prof. Saridis was Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Systems

Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was also Director of the

Robotics and Automations Lab at RPI. Prior to coming to RPI, he taught for many

years at Purdue University.

He received the Dipomal in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the

National Technical University of Athens in 1955 and the MSEE and Ph.D from

Purdue University in 1963 and 1965 respectively.

Prof. Saridis was a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a Member of the Academy of

Athens as well as being a member of the ASME, SPIE, and SME. He authored or

co-authored six books and approximately 400 technical papers.

Prof. Saridis continued to participate in RAS society activities as long as he

was physically able to do so, regularly attending the society's administrative

committee meetings and actively joining the debate on issues under discussion..

Many of his students, (who called him "Chief" at Purdue and "Boss" at RPI) and

his 'grand-students' have followed his example to become leaders in both RAS and

the wider technical community of robotics and automation.

Prof. Saridis is survived by his wife Youla.

This book attempts to couple control engineering with modern developments in science, through the concept of entropy. Such disciplines as intelligent machines, economics, manufacturing, environmental systems, waste etc. can be favourably affected and their performances can be improvedortheir catastrophic effects minimized. Entropy is used as the unifying measure of the various, seemingly disjoint, disciplines to represent the cost of producing work that improves the standard of living, both in engineering and in science. Modelling is done through probabilistic methods, thus establishing the irreversibility of the processes involved. This is in accordance with the modern view of science. In addition, the behaviour of control for an arbitrary but fixed controller away from the optimal (equilibrium) has been obtained, the analytic expression of which should lead to chaotic solutions. The control activity is explained, based on the principle that "control is making a system do what we want it to do". This helps to relate control theory with the sciences.