STATS AND CONTROL 2026

Members of the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium (MACC) participated in the 2026 Ontario-Quebec Statistics and Control Meeting, commonly known as Stats and Control, hosted this year by Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Stats and Control is a long-standing annual gathering of the process systems engineering community in Ontario and Quebec. Established in the 1970s, the meeting has become an important forum for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty to share emerging work in process control, statistics, optimization, machine learning, data analytics, and industrial systems engineering.

Over the years, the meeting has brought together researchers from universities across the region, including McMaster University, Queen’s University, the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, Université Laval, Polytechnique Montréal, and other institutions in Ontario and Quebec. Its tradition reflects the foundations laid by pioneering researchers in statistics, control, and process systems engineering, including McMaster’s Dr. John F. MacGregor and other leaders who helped shape the field’s modern direction.

Four MACC students presented their research at this year’s meeting: Amir Hossein Hamedi, Arman Khani, Jose Daniel Rojas Dorantes, and Lina Hamed. Their presentations reflected several themes at the forefront of modern process systems engineering, including demand response, flexible operation of energy-intensive systems, green hydrogen production with PEM electrolyzers, reinforcement learning for scheduling and control, and root cause analysis using alarm and process data.

Beyond the technical sessions, the meeting provided an opportunity for students to exchange ideas, receive feedback, and build professional relationships with peers from other universities. These interactions are central to the spirit of Stats and Control: a meeting where the next generation of process systems engineering leaders can learn from one another, form lasting connections, and prepare for the complex challenges facing future industry.

MACC is proud to contribute to this tradition and to continue supporting students whose work sits at the intersection of theory, computation, data, and industrial impact.