Clarence W. de Silva, P.Eng., Fellow ASME and Fellow IEEE, is Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and has occupied the NSERC Research Chair in Industrial Automation since 1988. Prior to that he served as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University (1978–1987) and as a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (1987–1988). De Silva has earned Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978) and Cambridge University, England (1998). De Silva has also occupied the Mobil Endowed Chair Professorship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore (2000). He has served as a consultant to several companies including IBM and Westinghouse in the United States, and has led the development of six industrial machines. He is recipient of the Henry M. Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award and Yasundo Takahashi Education Award of the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME); Killam Research Prize; Outstanding Engineering Educator Award of IEEE Canada; Lifetime Achievement Award of the World Automation Congress; IEEE Third Millennium Medal; Meritorious Achievement Award of the Association of Professional Engineers of British Columbia; and the Outstanding Contribution Award of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has authored 16 technical books including Sensors and Actuators—Control System Instrumentation (Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, 2007); Vibration: Fundamentals and Practice , Second Edition (Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, 2006); Mechatronics—An Integrated Approach (Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, 2005); Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems Design—Theory, Tools, and Applications (with F. Karry, Addison-Wesley, 2004); Intelligent Control: Fuzzy Logic Applications (CRC Press, 1995); Control Sensors and Actuators (Prentice Hall, 1989); over 170 journal papers; and a similar number of conference papers and book chapters. He has served as editor of twelve books and on the editorial boards of twelve international journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief, of International Journal of Control and Intelligent Systems; and was Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering Systems; Senior Technical Editor, Measurements and Control; and Regional Editor, North America, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence—the International Journal of Intelligent Real-Time Automation. He is a Lilly Fellow, NASAASEE Fellow, Senior Fulbright Fellow at Cambridge University, Fellow of the Advanced Systems Institute of British Columbia, Killam Fellow, and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.