Ph.D. 1974 Automatic Control from Lund Institute of Technology
Professor The Chair of Automatic Control In Linkoping, Sweden
Director The Stratetic Research Center
Visiting Positions Stanford and MIT
Fellow IEEE
Fellow & Advisor IFAC
Member The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA)
Honorary Member The Hungarian Academy of Engineering
Foreign Associate The US National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
Honorary Doctorates The Baltic State Technical University in St Petersburg, Uppsala University, Sweden, The Technical University of Troyes, France, & The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
The Quazza Medal IFAC, 2002
Hendryk W. Bode Lecture Prize The IEEE Control Systems Society, 2003
The IEEE Control Systems Award 2007

System identification is the art and science of building mathematical models of dynamic systems from observed input-output data. It can be seen as the interface between the real world of applications and the mathematical world of control theory and model abstractions. As such it is an ubiquitous necessity for successful applications.

The area has many facets and there are many approaches and methods. The presentaion aims at both giving an overview of the "science" side, i.e. basic principles and result and at illustrating the practical, "art", side of how to approach a real problem.

System identification is a very large topic, with different techniques that depend on the character of the models to be estimated, linear, non-linear, hybrid, nonparametric etc. At the same time, the area can be characterized by a small number of leading principles, e.g. to look for sustainable descriptions by proper trade-offs in the triangle of model complexity, information contents in the data, and effective validation.