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 Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, where he is now a full Professor. He is currently the associate director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He has been a visiting Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, California 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 Donald 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 Automation in 2003, and at the MTNS in 2006. 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, filtering, information theory, and computation which include control problems with communication constraints and distributed mobile agents with local decision capabilities. He is also interested in various problems in network science including distributed computation over noisy networks as well as information propagation over complex 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.

Brett Ninness, BE (Hons I), ME, Ph.D (Univ. Newcastle, Australia) is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

His research interests are in the areas of system identification and stochastic signal processing. Over the last several years a particular research interest has been the quantification of estimation errors induced by measurement noise (variance error). More recently, he has been focusing on developing new algorithms for robust and efficient model estimation and evaluation of multivariable systems using the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.

Kameshwar Poolla received the Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1980, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1984. He has served on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana from 1984 to 1991. Since then, he has been with the University of California, Berkeley where he is the Chancellor’s Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences.

Professor Poolla's research interests include System Identification, Robust Control, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Sensor Networks, and Medical Imaging.