Bruce Hajek

Bruce Hajek
Bruce Hajek in 2010 at conference "Mathematical Challenges in Stochastic Networks" at Oberwolfach
Born
Bruce Edward Hajek

(1955-08-20) August 20, 1955 (age 69)
Elmhurst, Illinois[1]
TitleHead of ECE department
Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Endowed Chair in Engineering
Professor, ECE
Professor, CSL
Professor, Center for Advanced Study[2]
SpouseBeth Scheid[3]
Awards
Academic background
Education
Alma materUC Berkeley (PhD)
ThesisStochastic Integration, Markov Property and Measure Transformation of Random Fields (1979)
Doctoral advisorEugene Wong
Academic work
DisciplineElectrical and computer engineering
Sub-disciplineCommunication networks
Random processes
InstitutionsUIUC
Doctoral students
Websitehttp://hajek.ece.illinois.edu/

Bruce Edward Hajek (born August 20, 1955) is a Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.[4][5][6] He does research in communication networking, auction theory, stochastic analysis, combinatorial optimization, machine learning, information theory, and bioinformatics.

Background, education, and positions

Bruce Hajek attended Willowbrook High School in Villa Park, Illinois. In 1973, he won the USA Mathematical Olympiad.[7][8] In the same year, he graduated from high school. He entered the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) to study computer science, but later he switched his major to mathematics.[9] After working in Summer 1975 at Brookhaven National Laboratory[1] with Herbert Robbins,[10] he graduated in 1976 with a BS in mathematics from UIUC and received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He completed his MS degree in electrical engineering in 1977, again from UIUC, and then took his Fellowship to UC Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 1979 under Eugene Wong.[11][12] The same year, he returned to the department of UIUC in Electrical & Computer Engineering, starting as an assistant professor and then becoming an associate professor (1982) and then a professor (1985).[5] He was named the Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Chair in Engineering in 2006.[13]

Since 1986, he has been a recurring visitor at Cambridge University.[14] In the 2009-2010 academic year, he was appointed a Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge.[15]

In 1989, Bruce Hajek was elevated to IEEE fellow for contributions to stochastic systems, communication networks, and control systems.[16]

Service and leadership

From 1990 to 1993, Hajek served as the editor-in-chief for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.[17] In 1995, he served as the president of the IEEE Information Theory Society.[18] He has mentored 18 PhD students, including IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.[19][20]

Research

Random fields

Bruce Hajek's PhD dissertation, titled Stochastic Integration, Markov Property and Measure Transformation of Random Fields,[21][22] studied random fields of three types: continuous-parameter Markov random fields, continuous-parameter random fields admitting stochastic-integral representations, and random fields "arising from transformations of absolutely continuous measures". This work on random fields has been recognized by others.[23] In 1987, Hajek and Toby Berger showed that, under weak assumptions, a Markov random field whose entries take values in a finite-order field (F,+,·) can be written as a component-wise sum of two independent random fields with F-valued components, with one of these two random fields being independent and identically distributed according to a nondegenerate probability measure.[24]

Communication networks

Hajek's work has significantly furthered the integration of computers and communications systems. His many papers have taken the chaotic field of communication networking and given it a coherence and conceptual structure that it previously lacked. In the early 1980s, he led research that proved the stability of dynamically controlled ALOHA multiple access. He and his students also developed algorithms for dynamic routing and transmission scheduling. These innovations showed that determinism in service time minimizes waiting time in network queues.[25] In relation to these achievements, he was inducted to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999 "for contributions to stochastic systems, communication networks, and control".[26] In 2003, he received the IEEE Kobayashi Award "for the application of stochastic and probabilistic theory to improved understanding of computer-network behavior, particularly, the modeling and performance optimization of multiple-access channels."

The citation for the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award says,[27]

Dr. Hajek has contributed to understanding fundamentally important issues such as how burstiness creates delays in queuing systems, and how burstiness can be mitigated. In several contexts he elaborated the consequences of drift towards desireable equlibria in networks, with applications to simulated annealing for discrete optimization problems. His work on the structure of optimal control mechanisms for routing and load balancing led to proofs of threshold structure, and invention of the concepts of load percolation and multimodular functions. He also introduced novel applications of game theory within network analysis, such as a jamming game for timing channels and truthful mechanisms for flow control.

Simulated annealing

A large fraction of Hajek's citations[28] comes from his work on simulated annealing.[29][10][30][31][32][33] His most cited paper, Cooling schedules for optimal annealing,[32][10] gives a nice condition for convergence of simulated annealing to global minima, depending on the annealing schedule.

Books

In 2015, Hajek collaborated with Cambridge University Press to publish as a book his course notes for his Random Processes course, ECE 534, at UIUC. The book is titled Random Processes for Engineers.[34] He is also a co-author on the second edition of a more advanced book, Eugene Wong's Stochastic Processes in Engineering Systems (Springer, 1985).[35]

Awards and honors

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Hajek, Bruce; van Loon, Timothy (1982). "Decentralized dynamic control of a multiaccess broadcast channel". IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. 27 (3): 559–569. doi:10.1109/TAC.1982.1102978.
  2. ^ "Bruce Hajek". Illinois Experts. Retrieved 31 Dec 2021.
  3. ^ "Runner profile: The Hajek/Scheid family". The News-Gazette. Community Media Group. 8 July 2019. Retrieved 31 December 2021.
  4. ^ "Bruce Hajek". Retrieved 26 Dec 2021.
  5. ^ a b "Bruce Hajek named ECE ILLINOIS Department Head". Retrieved 26 Dec 2021.
  6. ^ "Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Chair in Engineering". Retrieved 26 Dec 2021.
  7. ^ Klamkin, Murray (1988). USA Mathematical Olympiads 1972-1986. Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 0-88385-634-4.
  8. ^ Greitzer, S. (1974). "The second U.S.A. Mathematical Olympiad". American Mathematical Monthly. 81 (3): 252–255. doi:10.2307/2319524. JSTOR 2319524.
  9. ^ "Bruce Hajek". UIUC Electrical & Computer Engineering.
  10. ^ a b c Hajek, Bruce (1986). "Optimization by simulated annealing: a necessary and sufficient condition for convergence". In van Ryzin, John (ed.). Adaptive Statistical Procedures and Related Topics. Institute of Mathematical Statistics. pp. 417–427.
  11. ^ "Bruce Hajek". IEEE Explore.
  12. ^ "Eugene Wong - The Mathematics Genealogy Project". Mathematics Genealogy Project.
  13. ^ Koon, Mike (2019-08-30). "Bruce Hajek named ECE Department Head". University of Illinois.
  14. ^ a b c d "Bruce Hajek". UIUC Electrical & Computer Engineering.
  15. ^ "NM Rothschild & Sons". Isaac Newton Institute. 23 March 2021.
  16. ^ "IEEE Fellows 1989 | IEEE Communications Society".
  17. ^ "Past Editors". Information Theory Society. 2021.
  18. ^ "Past Presidents". IEEE Information Theory Society.
  19. ^ "Students". Bruce Hajek.
  20. ^ Gelles, David (May 15, 2022). "An Optimist and a Realist at the Helm". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
  21. ^ "Ph.D. Dissertations - Eugene Wong". UC Berkeley (eecs.berkeley.edu).
  22. ^ Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports. NASA, Office of Scientific and Technical Information. 1980.
  23. ^ "Eugene Wong". About the IEEE (archived page).
  24. ^ Hajek, Bruce; Berger, Toby (1987). "A decomposition theorem for binary Markov random fields". Ann. Probab. 15 (3): 1112–1125. doi:10.1214/aop/1176992084.
  25. ^ "Bruce Hajek". Engineering and Technology History Wiki. 19 January 2016.
  26. ^ a b "Dr. Bruce Hajek". NAE Website. Retrieved 2018-03-11.
  27. ^ a b "Bruce Hajek Wins the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award". ACM SIGMETRICS.
  28. ^ Bruce Hajek publications indexed by Google Scholar
  29. ^ Hajek, Bruce (1985). "A tutorial survey of theory and applications of simulated annealing". 1985 24th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. pp. 755–760. doi:10.1109/CDC.1985.268599. S2CID 9928671.
  30. ^ Hajek, Bruce (1987). "4.18 Cooling schedules for optimal annealing". In Cover, Thomas; Gopinath, B (eds.). Open Problems in Communication and Computation. Springer. pp. 147–150.
  31. ^ Sasaki, Galen; Hajek, Bruce (1988). "The time complexity of maximum matching by simulated annealing". Journal of the ACM. 35 (2): 387–403. doi:10.1145/42282.46160. hdl:1721.1/2930. S2CID 11883757.
  32. ^ a b Hajek, Bruce (1988). "Cooling schedules for optimal annealing". Mathematics of Operations Research. 13 (2): 311–329. doi:10.1287/moor.13.2.311. JSTOR 3689827.
  33. ^ Hajek, Bruce; Sasaki, Galen (1989). "Simulated annealing --- to cool or not". Systems & Control Letters. 12 (5): 443–447. doi:10.1016/0167-6911(89)90081-9.
  34. ^ Hajek, Bruce (2015). Random Processes for Engineers. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-10012-1.
  35. ^ Wong, Eugene; Hajek, Bruce (1985). Stochastic Processes in Engineering Systems (2nd ed.). Springer.
  36. ^ "2022: EECS Distinguished Alumni". Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS) 2022. 20 March 2022. Retrieved 10 October 2022.
  37. ^ "Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award". Information Theory Society.
  38. ^ Bloch, Matthieu (1 April 2014). "Bruce Hajek named recipient of the 2014 Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award". News. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  39. ^ "Markov Lecture - Applied Probability Society". INFORMS. Retrieved 2021-12-26.
  40. ^ "IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award: Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 26, 2019. Retrieved 2021-12-26.
  41. ^ "Bruce Hajek". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
  42. ^ "IEEE Fellows 1989". IEEE Communications Society — IEEE ComSoc. IEEE Communications Society. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  43. ^ "Award # 8352030 — Presidential Young Investigator Award: Stochastic Algorithms and Analysis for Large Communication Networks". NSF Award Search. National Science Foundation. Retrieved 19 November 2022.