Rockhampton has welcomed its latest batch of Chinese scholars attracted by CQUniversity's Centre for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CINS) and its world-renowned leader, Professor Qing-Long Han...

The complex number-crunching innovations enabled by these visiting researchers will boost the world's capacity to produce food and consumer products, run transport systems and create smarter power grids.

Visiting scholars L-R Dr Ying Zhou, Dr Baozhu Du, Dr Zhou Wang, Dr Shuqian Zhu, Dr Qiang Zang and Yillian Zhang CQUniversity is looking forward to helping the visitors find fresh applications for their work, especially in the field of engineering.

Professor Han, Director of CINS, and his team have made significant contributions to the University's 2012 ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) rankings in Mathematical Sciences and Applied Mathematics which are ranked 'well above world standard'. Only two universities achieved ERA RANK 5 in Applied Mathematics, and three universities achieved ERA RANK 5 in Mathematical Sciences.

Professor Han is a leading researcher in time-delay systems, networked control systems, robust control and fault-tolerant control. He has been honoured with a range of distinguished adjunct roles at several Chinese universities.

The visiting scholars (foreground) are welcomed by L-R Professor Graham Pegg, Professor Scott Bowman and Professor Qing-Long Han

Networked control systems are spatially distributed systems in which the communication between sensors, actuators and controllers occurs through a shared band-limited digital communication network. They have significant economic impact on a broad scale.

Professor Han says intelligent networked systems behaviour can be viewed as the convergence of four major areas - networks, computational intelligence, data mining and agent-based systems.

The hallmark of work by Professor Han and his colleagues in these areas has been a focus on quality research as evidenced by top journal publications, quality research higher degree completions and national competitive grants.

The latest scholars hosted at CINS are:

- Visiting Associate Professor Dr Shuqian Zhu from Shandong University who is studying Robust Control for Positive Time-delay Systems and its Applications;

- Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow  Dr Baozhu Du from Nanjing University of Science and Technology  who is studying Active Control for Input-Delay Systems under Airy Wave Force;

- Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Zhou Wang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology who is studying Design and implementation of a multi-agent system in smart grids;

- Visiting Associate Professor Dr Ying Zhou from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications who is studying Adaptive Control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems under network environments;

- Visiting Lecturer Dr Qiang Zang from the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology who is studying Stability analysis and control synthesis of nonlinear differential-algebraic equations subsystems; and

- Joint PhD student Yilian Zhang from East China University of Science and Technology who is studying Investigation of Networked Control Systems with communication constraints and incomplete information.