Karl Johan Åström, Swedish engineer and theorist
Karl Johan Åström (born August 5, 1934) is a Swedish control theorist, who has made contributions to the fields of control theory and control engineering, computer control and adaptive control. In 1965, he described a general framework of Markov decision processes with incomplete information, what ultimately led to the notion of a Partially observable Markov decision process.

In 1995, Åström was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to identification, stochastic, and adaptive control and their incorporation in control engineering practice.