Gabriel Maik, a doctoral student from our Faculty, received the 1st Degree Distinction in the National Competition for the Best Master's Thesis – Master 4 Science 2022. Congratulations!

The thesis titled "Non-parametric identification of mechanical systems under cyclostationary excitation" was written at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, WUST, under the supervision of Prof. Grzegorz Mzyk from the Department of Control Systems and Mechatronics. The jury, composed of representatives of leading universities in Poland, business partners of the competition, and members of the Polish IEEE Section, awarded the thesis as one of the best from among 84 diploma theses from the entire country.

In his thesis, Gabriel Maik focused on solving the problem of identifying Wiener systems with non-parametric non-linear characteristics for a strictly cyclostationary excitation – i.e. with stochastic processes in which the probability density function changes periodically.

– It all started when Prof. Grzegorz Mzyk received a proposal from Prof. Kainam Thomas Wong to generalize the identification algorithms developed so far at our university to the case of cyclostationary excitation. As I was already planning a doctorate in the field of system identification, it was natural for me to join the current research – says Gabriel Maik.

As part of his master's thesis, he not only addressed the internationally developed non-parametric identification algorithm, but also proposed his own alternative parametric-non-parametric version of the algorithm. In the course of his work, the author faced the problem of developing formal evidence for the convergence of algorithms, conducting experiments on a real object and performing a substantial literature review aimed among others to justify the research topic.

All of these challenges required knowledge and skills in such fields as statistics, algebra and control theory, as well as a lot of work and many hours of experimentation to solve a number of nuances and enable the adaptation of the developed theory in a practical example – explains the doctoral student.

– I didn't count on any awards, and after submitting the thesis, I didn't even bother with the award announcement date. Soon after that, I completely forgot about the whole thing and was only reminded about it when I received another e-mail from the organizers. I guessed that it was about the results of the competition and I was genuinely interested in the titles of the winning theses. It turned out that my work was on the list. I immediately shared this information with my supervisor, family and friends.  

Gabriel Maik graduated from Mechatronics with a specialization in Mechatronics in Manufacturing Systems. The field of study was related to the trend of non-parametric identification of systems developed over the years at the Faculty of Electronics, and currently at the Department of Control Systems and Mechatronics at the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology.

The laureate of the Master 4 Science competition is currently a doctoral student at our Faculty, and his dissertation is a continuation of the research undertaken as part of his master's thesis. He claims that he is not limited to the identification of mechanical systems, but deals with non-linear systems in general. The topic of his Ph.D. thesis is "Non-parametric identification of non-linear systems with cyclostationary input signals", and the supervisors are Prof. Grzegorz Mzyk and Prof. Paweł Wachel.

The Master 4 Science competition was organized by the 4 Science Institute under the auspices of the Polish Section of IEEE and GovTech Poland. The business partners of the competition included Intel Corporation and Billon.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers is an organization of scientists in the fields of electrical engineering, electronics, telecommunications, computer engineering, information technology, as well as other specialists in the related fields. Their primary task is to set and approve standards for electronic devices.

The award ceremony was held at the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology, Warsaw University of Technology during the 50th anniversary of the Polish Section of IEEE on 9n December, 2022.

Photos: Polish Section of IEEE.