John Baras

Short CV

Professor John S. Baras holds a permanent joint appointment as professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR). He is also a faculty member in the interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation Program, and an affiliate professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. He was the founding director of ISR, which is one of the first six National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centers (ERC). John S. Baras is the Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering and is the founding and current director of the Maryland Hybrid Networks (HyNet) Center, an industry-university center of excellence focusing on hybrid (wireless and wireline) communication and sensor networks. He is also a guest professor in the School of Electrical Engineering of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. John S. Baras has nine patents issued and three more pending.

Selected Awards

• 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow: “for distinguished contributions to the fields of systems and control, communication networks, network security, and leadership in establishing outstanding crossdisciplinary research and education programs.”
• 2014, March, SIAM Fellow: “for contributions to systems theory, stochastic control and communication networks.”
• 2013, Awarded the prestigious 2014 Tage Erlander Guest Professorship, by the Swedish Research Council, at the ACCESS Linnaeus center, of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.
• 2013, IEEE Life Fellow.
• 2012, Award for "The Largest Selling Product", the other one of the two most significant awards bestowed at the Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program (MIPS) 25th Anniversary Gala Celebration. Selection was among all products developed from research that received funding from MIPS. Award was given for HughesNet®, the product which resulted from Dr. Baras’ collaboration with Hughes Network Systems. HughesNet® is the largest-selling product ever developed with the help of the MIPS program. Dr. Baras created the algorithms by which the Internet is delivered over satellite worldwide. The award covers a period of 25 years.
• 2012, Award for “Principal Investigator with Greatest Impact”, one of the two most significant awards bestowed at the Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program (MIPS) 25th Anniversary Gala Celebration. Selection was among all faculty PIs over 25 years. For creating the algorithms by which Internet is delivered over satellites worldwide.
• 2009, Maryland Innovator of the Year from the Maryland Daily Record for the invention “Method and Implementation for Key Generation and Replacement using Markov Models”.
• 2008, Outstanding Invention of the Year Award from the University of Maryland for the invention “Method and Implementation for Key Generation and Replacement using Markov Models”. 2008 Globecom '08 Best Paper Award for Wireless Networks, IEEE Global Communications Conference
• 2008, held at New Orleans, Louisiana; for the paper “Performance Metric Sensitivity Computation for Optimization and Trade-off Analysis in Wireless Networks”.
• 2007, Leonard G. Abraham Prize in Communication Systems, IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc), presented at the International Conference on Communications (ICC2007), for the paper “On Trust Models and Trust Evaluation Metrics for Ad Hoc Networks”, Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, Security in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 318-328, 2006. 2006 Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). 2004 Best Paper Award, presented at the ACM Workshop on Wireless Security, WiSe ’04, for the paper “Trust Evaluation in Ad-Hoc Networks”.
• 1998, Mancur Olson Research Achievement Award, from the University of Maryland College Park; award honors faculty whose research achievements have been extraordinary over a long time period.
• 1997, Outstanding Service and Contributions to the Development of Strategic Directions for Increasing the Competitiveness of Maryland’s Growth Industry Sectors, presented by the Maryland Economic Development Commission in collaboration with the Department of Business and Economic Development of the State of Maryland.
• 1994, Outstanding Invention of the Year Award from the University of Maryland for the invention of “A System Design for a Hybrid Network Data Communications Terminal Using Asymmetric TCP/IP to Support Internet Applications”.
• 1991, Outstanding Invention of the Year Award from the University of Maryland for the invention of a “Low Complexity CELP Speech Coder”.
• 1984, IEEE Fellow; “for contributions to distributed parameter systems theory, quantum and nonlinear estimation, and control of queuing systems”.
• 1980, George S. Axelby Award, IEEE, Control Systems Society; for the paper “Discrete-Time Point Processes in Urban Traffic Queue Estimation”, IEEE Transactions On Automatic Control, AC-24, no. 1, pp. 12-27,1979.
• 1978, 1983, 1993, Naval Research Laboratory and Alan Berman Research Publication Awards.

Research Interests

John S. Baras’ research interests include systems and control theory, communication theory, selected areas of computing, optimization, deterministic and stochastic optimal control, game theory (non-cooperative and cooperative), learning, cyber-physical systems, model-based systems engineering, multi-agent systems, robotics, nonlinear control, stochastic systems, information theory, signal processing and understanding, multi-sensory perception and cognition, distributed control (or decision) systems, real-time sequential detection and estimation, heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, quantum control-communication-information-computing, systems biology, mathematical biology, bioinformatics, network security and trust, broadband wireless networks, physical layer security for mobile wireless devices and networks, communication networks management, smart manufacturing, smart power grids, smart transportation systems, health information technology, systems medicine.

Selected Publications

• Kyrtsos, Christina Rose; Baras, John S.: Studying the Role of APOE in Alzheimer's Disease Pathogenesis using a Systems Biology Model. Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology 11 (05), 2013, 1342003.

• Purkayastha, Punyaslok; Baras, John S.: Convergence results for ant routing algorithms via stochastic approximation. ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst. 8 (1), 2013, 1-34.

• Theodorakopoulos, G.; Le Boudec, Jean-Yves; Baras, J. S.: Selfish Response to Epidemic Propagation. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 58 (2), 2013, 363-376.

• Matei, Ion; Baras, John S.; Somarakis, Christoforos: Convergence Results for the Linear Consensus Problem under Markovian Random Graphs. SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization 51 (2), 2013, 1574-1591.

• Zhou, Yuchen; Baras, John S.: CPS Modeling Integration Hub and Design Space Exploration with Application to Microrobotics. In: Control of Cyber-Physical Systems. Springer Science + Business Media, 2013.

• Sztipanovits, J.; Koutsoukos, X.; Karsai, G.; Kottenstette, N.; Antsaklis, P.; Gupta, V.; Goodwine, B.; Baras, J.; Shige Wang: Toward a Science of Cyber–Physical System Integration. Proceedings of the IEEE 100 (1), 2012, 29-44.

• Somasundaram, Kiran K.; Baras, John S.: Solving multi-metric network problems: An interplay between idempotent semiring rules. Linear Algebra and its Applications 435 (7), 2011, 1494-1512.

• Baras, J.S.; Theodorakopoulos, G.: Path Problems in Networks. Synthesis Lectures on Communication Networks, 2010.

• Xi, Wei; Tan, Xiaobo; Baras, John S.: Gibbs sampler-based coordination of autonomous swarms. Automatica 42 (7), 2006, 1107-1119.