Professor Vladimír Kučera from the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics was among the eight former representatives of the Masaryk Institute of Higher Studies decorated with the Albín Bráf medal during a festive gala held at the Betlém Chapel at the end of April. The prized award commemorating one of the founders of the Czech economics education and the 100th anniversary of the institute’s foundation was presented by the Masaryk Institute Director Lenka Švecová to the institute’s former representatives who after 1989 significantly contributed to the renewal of open and unrestricted education of economic subjects at CTU. Prof. Kučera was the Institute’s Director from 2007 until 2015.
Prof. Vladimír Kučera is currently the vice director of CIIRC CTU and the head of the Scientific Management of Platforms Department. In the past he ran the Institute of Information and Automation Theory at the Academy of Sciences and acted as the Dean of the Department of the Electrotechnics at CTU. He has authored many scientific publications.
The research interests of V. Kučera include automatic control systems. He contributed to the theory of Riccati equations and pioneered the use of polynomial equations in the design of control systems. His best result is the parameterization of all controllers that stabilize a given plant, known as the Youla-Kučera parameterization, which has become a new paradigm in robust and optimal control. Recently, he has resolved a long-standing open problem of control theory – decoupling of linear systems by static-state feedback.
