João Hespanha was born in Coimbra, October 13, 1968. His research interests concerns electrical engineering and automatic control field. He is Associate Professor at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. He received the licenciatura and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal, in 1991 and 1993, respectively and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and applied science from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1994 and 1998, respectively.   He  was a  visiting Post-doctoral research engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA from 1998 to 1999. From 1999 to 2001, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

He went to the United States in 1993 to pursue a PhD degree at Yale University, where he had no specific contact, but was offered a University fellowship that covered his tuition and a fraction of his living expenses. Initially, he also had a fellowship for the Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica (JNICT).

 From 1996 to the present he authored numerous papers with multiple collaborations: co-edited two books, wrote 14 book chapters, about 40 journal papers, and over 100 conference papers. Most of these papers were co-authored with colleagues or students.  An  updated list of his papers can be found at the following url:

http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~hespanha/published.html

João Hespanha started his research at IST with Prof. Antonio Pascoal. He encouraged him to pursue a PhD abroad so he applied to Yale University. His PhD program at Yale started in 1993 and finished in December 1998. At that time, he applied to a faculty position at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, USA and was offered an Assistant professor position starting in 1999. This gave him a year to do post-doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, before he started teaching at USC. Although he was not planning to leave USC, in 2001 he received an offer for an Associate Professor position at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So, he moved in January 2002 and have been here since then.

João Hespanha is the principal investigator in several projects and we present the list of the projects that he has participated in (decreasing order of end date). In several of those projects he had co-investigators also indicated in the list that follows:

1.     “Cooperative Control of UAVs for Tracking Moving Targets Through Information Gain.” Funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through Toyon Research Corporation, Oct. 2005–Oct. 2007 (coPI: Bassam Bamieh).

2.     “Infinite-Dimensional Stochastic Hybrid Systems: A Unified Framework for Distributed Control with Limited and Disrupted Communication.” Funded by NSF, Aug. 2003–Jul. 2007 (coPI: Andrew Teel).

3.     “Decentralized Computation and Control in Large-Scale Networks.” Funded by the Army Research Office through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, Oct. 2005–Sep. 2006 (coPI: Upamanyu Madhow).

4.     “Stochastic Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Sensor and Biochemical Networks.” Funded by the Army Research Office through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, Oct. 2005–Sep. 2006 (PI: Mustafa Khammash).

5.     “Switching and Logic in Control.” NSF CAREER award, July 2001–July 2006.

6.     “Collaborative Research: A Hybrid Systems Framework for Scalable Analysis and Design of Communications Networks.” Funded by NSF, Aug. 2003–Jul. 2006.

7.     “A Robust Stability and Control Theory for Hybrid Dynamical Systems.” Funded by the Army Research Office, Jun. 2003–Jun. 2006 (PI: Andrew Teel).

8.     “Control of Cooperative Engagements with Robust and Distributed Optimization.” Funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through Toyon Research Corporation, Aug. 2005–Apr. 2006.

9.     “Stochastic Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Sensor and Biochemical Networks.” Funded by the Army Research Office through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, Feb. 2005–Feb. 2006 (PI: Mustafa Khammash).

10. “Cooperative Control of UAV’s for Tracking Moving Targets Through Information Gain.” Funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through Toyon Research Corporation, Sep. 2004–Jun. 2005 (coPI: Bassam Bamieh).

11. “Development of the Modeling and Simulation Tools for Guided Airdrop Systems.” Funded by the Naval Post-graduate School, Sep. 2004–Dec. 2004.

12. “Localization of Ground Threats for a Temporal Evaluation Model for Mobile Profiled Threats.” Funded by the Office of Naval Research through SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego, CA, Sep. 2003–Apr. 2004.

13. “Real-Time Mixed-Initiative Cooperative Path Planning in Uncertain Environments.” Funded by DARPA/IXO MICA-Mixed Initiative Control of Automa-teams Program, Oct. 2003–Jan. 2004.

14. “Probabilistic Mapping and Distributed Cooperative Mission Planning.” Funded by DARPA/IXO MICAMixed Initiative Control of Automa-teams Program through Honeywell Laboratories, Nov. 2001–Sep. 2003.

15. “Probabilistic Mapping for Mobile Profiled Target Sets.” Funded by SPAWAR Systems Center, San Diego, CA, Aug. 2002–Feb. 2003.

16. “Advanced Mathematical Control and Identification Techniques for Autonomic Information Assurance.” Funded by DARPA/ISO Information Assurance and Survivability Program, July 2000–June 2002. Joint grant with faculty from the Dept. of Mathematics and the Information Sciences Institute.

17. “Pursuit-Evasion Strategies for Multi-Agent Teams.” Funded by Office of Naval Research through the Univ. California at Berkeley, May 2000–May 2002.

18. “Integrated Media Systems Center.” Funded by NSF (ERC), July 1996–Dec. 2001. Joint grant with faculty from Engineering, Music, Cinema/TV, Communications, and Education.

19. “Vision-Based Control of Robots.” Funded by the James H. Zumberge Fund, July 2000-June 2001.

20. “Coordination of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.” Funded by Office of Naval Research through the Univ. California at Berkeley, Sep. 1999–Sep. 2000.

21. “Probabilistic Models for Agile Control of Military Operations.” Funded by DARPA/ISO JFACC Program through Honeywell Technology Center and the Univ. California at Berkeley, Sep. 1999–Feb. 2000.

The size of his research group varies. He has currently 4 PhD students and co-advises 3 more students. At the moments he has no  Post-Doctoral students. He graduated 3 PhD students: two of these work in research companies and the third is an assistant professor. Two more students are scheduled to graduate in the  summer of 2006 .

«My main dream is to be able to continue to do what I have been doing in the past few years. I enjoy the excitement provided by scientific research and I like teaching at the University. The least pleasant part of what I do is the constant need to search for research funding. I could do without this part of my work», João Hespanha says.

He also explains the main reason  for wich he is recognized in  the scientific community: «I am mostly known by my work on Automatic Control using algorithms based on logic and switching to control physical systems, such as aircraft, helicopters, mobile robots, etc». Until this moment he received no formal invitations to return to Portugal.

Awards:

1.     2005 Automatica Theory/Methodology best paper prize for the 2002-2004 period with the paper “J. P. Hespanha and A. S. Morse. Switching between stabilizing controllers. Automatica, 38(11), Nov. 2002.” This prize is awarded once every three years by the International Federation of Automatic Control to the best theory/methodology paper published in the previous three years in the journal Automatica.

2.     Best paper award at the 2nd Int. Conf. on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing with: “P. Barooah and J. P. Hespanha. Estimation from relative measurements: Error bounds from electrical analogy. In Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, Jan. 2005.” This prize is awarded once every year to the best paper presented at the ICISIP.

3.     Plenary speaker at the 5th Portuguese Conference on Automatic Control (Controlo 2002), University of Aveiro, September 5, 2002. Talk entitled “Switched Systems: Mixing Logic with Differential Equations.”

4.     Elected to the grade of Senior Member at the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), June 2002.

5.     Recipient of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, Jul. 2001. The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.

6.     Listed in USC’s Faculty Honor Roll, Fall 1999. The faculty honor roll distinguishes faculty that obtained exceptional scores in teaching evaluations.

7.     Recipient of Yale University’s Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate Prize for exceptional achievement in research in Engineering and Applied Science, May 1999. J. P. Hespanha. Logic-Based Switching Algorithms in Control. PhD Thesis, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1998.

8.     Member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, 1998. hespanha at ece.ucsb.edu