Munther A. Dahleh (born 1962, Tulkarem, Jordanian-Occupied West Bank ) is the William Coolidge Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).
Dahleh is internationally known for his contributions to robust control theory, computational methods for controller design, the interplay between information and control, statistical learning of controlled systems and its relations to model reduction of stochastic systems, the fundamental limits of learning, decisions and risk in networked systems including physical, social, and economic networks with applications to transportation and power networks, and the understanding of the Economics of data and the design of real-time markets for data and digital goods. For his work in these areas, he was awarded the Axelby best paper award four times, the Donald P. Eckman Award for best control engineer under age 35, and the Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) societies. Dahleh is a current member of IEEE.
Education
Dahleh received his BS degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas) in 1983, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Rice University (Houston, Texas) in 1987.
Biographical
Dahleh He was born in city Tulkarem ,West Bank of the Jordan river (then as part of the Hashmite Kingdom of Jordan ) then raised in Amman, and moved to the United States when he was 17 years old to attend Texas A&M. He lived in Texas for seven years while earning his degrees in electrical engineering. Following graduation, in 1987 Dahleh joined MIT as an assistant professor, and achieved multiple teaching, research and leadership roles in academia, industry, and business sectors. He currently resides in Boston, MA with his wife and their three children.
Research and leadership
In the late 1980s, Dahleh solved the L1 optimal control problem — an open problem at the time that addresses robustness in the presence of persistent disturbances — using linear programming techniques. This work pioneered the development of computational approaches for robust controller synthesis. More recently, his work has advanced the development of a foundational theory for information propagation, decisions, and robustness of large dynamic networks arising in transportation, energy, finance, and social networks. On the applied side, Dahleh has developed and patented a methodology for managing both engine and motor switching in hybrid vehicles based on path characteristics; the patent was co-owned by Ford. He also developed a Robust-Hybrid-Automaton architecture for designing autonomous vehicles that combines planning and control.
Dahleh has been the founding director of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) since July 1, 2015.( The mission of IDSS is to provide an interdisciplinary home for decision theory, machine learning, statistics, and data science in the context of broad societal challenges. IDSS is a unique, multi-school initiative spanning the five schools of MIT: School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Sloan School of Management, and School of Science. MIT's Provost Martin Schmidt announced the newly formed institute as an effort to "create a new entity that focuses on complex socio-technical systems, information and decision systems, and statistics." Dahleh has served as the associate department head of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) and acting director of the MIT Engineering Systems Division (ESD), which operated from 1998 to June 30, 2015. He is also a member of MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), where he was associate director of 2007-2009 and acting director in 2010.