My research interests fall into the broad area of computer systems. A principal share of my research has targeted the software system support for concurrent servers. It started at around 2000 with my development of the Neptune server clustering middleware, which was deployed as the online software backbone for thousands of servers at the web search engine Ask.com. It has continued to the present day (2013), with my most recent work of the fine-grained power modeling and power virus containment on multicore servers. A dominant theme of my work has been to recognize the complexity of modern computer systems and then develop principled approaches to understand, characterize, and manage such complexities. In particular, I have strong interests in the cross-layer work of developing the software system solution to support emerging hardware or address hardware issues.
Christos G. Cassandras is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. He is also co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received degrees from Yale University (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982). In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 300 refereed papers in these areas, and five books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. He has recently collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents.
Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He is the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and has served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS. He has chaired the CSS Technical Committee on Control Theory, and served as Chair of several conferences. He has been a plenary speaker at many international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002, and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.
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 (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC.
