Munther A. Dahleh was born in 1962. He received the B.S. degree from Texas A & M university, College Station, Texas in 1983, and his Ph.D. degree from Rice University, Houston, TX, in 1987, all in Electrical Engineering. Since then, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Com- puter Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, where he is now a full Professor. He is currently the associate EECS department head at MIT. Previously, he was the acting director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He has been a visiting Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Califor- nia Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, for the Spring of 1993. He has held consulting positions with several companies in the US and abroad. Dr. Dahleh has been the recipient of the Ralph Budd award in 1987 for the best thesis at Rice University, George Axelby outstanding paper award (paper coauthored with J.B. Pearson in 1987), an NSF presidential young investigator award (1991), the Finmeccanica career development chair (1992) and the Don- ald P. Eckman award from the American Control Council in 1993, the Graduate Students Council teaching award in 1995, the George Axelby outstanding paper award (paper coauthored with Bamieh and Paganini in 2004), and the Hugo Schuck Award for Theory (for the paper coauthored with Martins). He became a fellow of IEEE in year 2000. He was a plenary speaker at the 1994 American Control Conference, at the Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automa- tion in 2003, at the MTNS in 2006, at SYSID in 2009, at Asian Control Con- ference in 2009, and at SING6 in 2010. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions On Automatic Control and for Systems and Control Letters. He is the co-author (with Ignacio Diaz-Bobillo) of the book Control of Uncertain Systems: A Linear Programming Approach, published by Prentice-Hall, and the co-author (with Nicola Elia) of the book Computational Methods for Controller Design published by Springer. Dr. Dahleh is interested in problems at the interface of robust control, filter- ing, information theory, and computation which include control problems with communication constraints and distributed mobile agents with local decision capabilities. In addition to methodology development, he has been interested in the application of distributed control in the future electric grid and the future transportation system with particular emphasis in the management of systemic risk. He is also interested in various problems in network science including dis- tributed computation over noisy network as well as information propagation over complex engineering and social networks. He is also interested in model reduction problems for discrete-alphabet hidden Markov models and universal learning approaches for systems with both continuous and discrete alphabets. He is also interested in the interface between systems theory and neurobiology, and in particular, in providing an anatomically consistent model of the motor control system.

Dr. WenZhan Song is Georgia Power Mickey A. Brown Professor of Engineering and Founding Director of the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems at the University of Georgia. Dr. Song’s research focus on smart sensing, networking, computing and security technologies and has made significant impact in health, energy and environment systems. He is a world leading expert on IoT/CPS data analytics & security and has a strong tracking record on leading large multidisciplinary research projects with numerous grant support from broad government agencies (NSF, NASA, DOE, DOD, NIH, USDA) and industry. His research was featured in MIT Technology Review, Network World, Scientific America, New Scientist, National Geographic, etc. Dr. Song received numerous awards from his university and professional society, such as NSF CAREER Award, Outstanding Research Contribution Award, Chancellor Research Excellence Award, Mark Weiser Best Paper Award. Dr. Song serves as editor, chair or TPC member in premium IEEE conferences (such as IEEE PERCOM, IEEE INFOCOM) and journals (such as IEEE Internet of Things, ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks). Dr. Song holds the faculty courtesy appointment in UGA computer science and statistics department.

A Research Project Manager at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems (http://www.isis.vanderbilt.edu) since 1999, Chris’ general professional interests lie in the practical application of novel, model-based formalisms and design methodologies to complex, real-world, human-in-the-loop, science/engineering activities.  After completing his B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Engineering at The University of Mississippi, Chris has pursued a career in R&D at organizations such as Cray Research Inc., UMiss Medical Center, The National Cancer Institute's Biomedical Supercomputing Center, and The Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University.  Currently, Mr. vanBuskirk serves as Executive Director for the NSF’s CPS Virtual Organization (http://cps-vo.org/), which actively supports the formation and development of distributed research communities required by the demanding challenges of the massively multi-disciplinary cyber-physical systems domain.  

Pravin Varaiya is Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.  From 1975 to 1992 he was also Professor of Economics.  His current research interests include transportation networks and electric power systems.  

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Honorary Doctorates, the Field Medal and Bode Prize of the IEEE Control Systems Society, the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, and the Outstanding Research Award of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society.  He is a Fellow of IEEE, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.