BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

THEODORE J. WILLIAMS

1923 - 2013

Dr. Theodore J. Williams was Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Director Emeritus of the Purdue Laboratory for Applied Industrial Control at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He served actively in these positions from 1965 through 1994. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University.

Before joining the staff at Purdue, Dr. Williams was senior engineering supervisor and was responsible for the computer control research program at the Monsanto Chemical Co., St. Louis Missouri, as well as Visiting Professor for Automatic Control at Washington University in St. Louis.

He has served two terms as President of the American Federation for Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) (1976-78). He is a former President of the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) (1965-67), and Past President of the Instrument Society of America (ISA) (1969). He was also Chairman of the Automation Research Council, a national body funded by the National Science Foundation (1974-80). He served a seven-year term as the first Chairman of Technical Committee TC-5, Computer Applications in Technology, of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and Chairman of Working Group 5.4 entitled, Common and/or Standardized Hardware and Software Techniques (1971-78). He was the Organizer, and Chairman of the International Purdue Workshop on Industrial Computer Systems (1969-89). In August 1990 he was named the first Chairman of the IFAC/IFIP Task Force on Architectures for Integrating Manufacturing Activities and Enterprises, and served for six years. This is the first joint task force set up by these two international bodies.

Dr. Williams is the author or editor of 50 books and 380 published technical papers in the fields of computer applications, process dynamics and industrial computer control. He guided and edited the original development of both the Purdue Reference Model for CIM and the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA).

In 1976, Professor Williams was the recipient of the Sir Harold Hartley Silver Medal, awarded by the Institute of Measurement and Control in London, England, the first American, and the first Non-Englishman to achieve this honor. In 1990, he was awarded the A. F. Sperry Founder Award Gold Medal by the Instrument Society of America, the only medal award made by the Society. In 1996, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, also from the Instrument Society of America.

In September 1992 he was named an Honorary Professor of the Institute of Automation of the Academia Sinica (The National Academy of Sciences of the Peoples Republic of China) at Shenyang, China.

Dr. Williams was a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Instrument Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Chemists, the Industrial Computing Society and The Institute of Measurement and Control (London). He was also an Honorary Life Member of the Instrument Society of America and the Society for Computer Simulation, and a senior member of the IEEE; a member of the ACS, the ASEE, etc.

Ted served as Fourth E.P. Schoch Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas in 1959, and as National Lecturer Series Lecturer for the ISA in 1960. He was also Plenary Lecturer in Process Dynamics for The Second Congress of the International Federation for Automatic Control (IFAC) at Basel, Switzerland, in 1963; Plenary Lecturer on Computer Control for the Fourth Congress of IFAC in Warsaw, Poland, in 1969; Plenary Lecturer at ACHEMA 70 in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1970; Plenary Lecturer at the Sixth Congress of IMEKO (International Measurement Confederation), Drezden, Germany, in 1971; and Keynote Speaker at the l1th BIAS Conference, 1981 in Milan, Italy, as well as Survey Speaker at each of the recent IFAC Congresses, and Keynote Speaker at several other smaller international meetings. He was General Chairman of the Fourth Joint Automatic Control Conference that was held at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in June 1963. In May 1977, he also served as the first A. Johnson Memorial Lecturer, Associate Committee for Automatic Control for the National Research Council of Canada.