Two CISE Affilated Faculty Named Distinguished Professors of Engineering
Professor Christos G. Cassandras and Professor John Baillieul have been selected as Distinguished Professors of Engineering, a title to be held throughout their careers at Boston University. These prominent faculty were selected based on their outstanding service to the College, teaching aptitude, as well as making a demonstrable difference in academia with their research, which has diverse applications in fields ranging from economics to electro-physics.
Christos G. Cassandras is Head of the Division of 系统工程, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a co-founder of CISE. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 350 refereed papers, five books, guest-edited several technical journal issues, and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. He has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration and simulation projects. Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009. He has also served as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society, Vice President for Publications, and a member of its Board of Governors. He has chaired several conferences and has been a plenary/keynote speaker at numerous international conferences. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize, a 2011 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition, a BU College of Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series Award, several honorary professorships, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).
John Baillieul has served as the chair of the Manufacturing Engineering and the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Departments at Boston University. He is a founding member of CISE. His research interests are in robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and in mathematical system theory. His current research focuses on extending and applying principles from nonlinear control theory to complex mechanical systems composed of interconnected rigid and elastic components. He has over 160 peer-reviewed papers. He is an IEEE, IFAC and SIAM Fellow. He is the recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Member Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the BU College of Engineering Inaugural Distinguished Lecturer Series Award, the T.S. Tsien International Outstanding Lecture at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Zaborsky Lecture at Washington University, and the Inaugural Wijesuriya P. Dayawansa Lecture at the Texas Tech University. His service to the profession includes Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society, President of the IEEE Control Systems Society, and Board of Directors of the IEEE.