John Lataire

J. Barry Oakes Award Recipient
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
[email protected]

Frequency domain measurement and identification of time-varying systems

Abstract

The growing technical advancements in the fields of sensors, instrumentation and signal processing give the opportunity to engineers and scientists to obtain increasingly sophisticated interpretations of their measurements. This talk focuses on the design and interpretation of measurements made on dynamic systems. More specifically, linear time-varying systems are considered. It will be discussed how valuable and sensible information can be extracted from these systems by using well-designed periodic excitation signals and, surprisingly, by interpreting the measurement results in the frequency domain. Intuitive insight into the time-varying character of the system is extracted from visual inspection of the ‘skirts’ that appear in the spectral responses. When considered a disturbance, the time variations are shown to act as frequency correlated noise on the measured signals. When considered a property of interest of the system, a time-varying transfer function of the system is constructed, based on a well-founded system theory. These concepts will be illustrated on simulation and measurement examples.

Presenter Bio

John Lataire was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1983. He received the degree of master in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in engineering sciences (Doctor in de Ingenieurswetenschappen) from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, in 2006 and 2011, respectively.
From October 2007 to October 2011, he was on a Ph.D. fellowship from the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO). Since August 2006, he has been working as a Researcher with the Department ELEC-VUB, Brussels.
As a co-author, he was the recipient of the Instrumentation and
Measurement Society 2014 Andy Chi Best Paper Award and of the Measurement Science and Technology Outstanding Paper Award in 2008. He has been selected as an outstanding reviewer of the IFAC journal Automatica for 2012-2013.
He has been a reviewer of several international peer-reviewed
journals since 2007, and has chaired technical sessions at several international conferences. Since 2013, he has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurements.
Since 2008, he has (co-)authored 23 publications in international peer-reviewed journals.
His main interests include the frequency domain formulation of
the identification of dynamic systems, with a specific focus on the identification of time-varying systems, and the use of kernel-based regression in system identification.
He considers system identification to be intrinsically linked with instrumentation and measurements, in the sense that system identification is an instrument to extract a model from measurement data made on the system at hand.