John A. Stankovic
Biography
Jack Stankovic’s research has greatly advanced the field of resource-constrained distributed networks, which include cyber-physical systems, wireless sensor nets, and the Internet of Things. Cyber-physical systems, pioneered by Stankovic and others, permeate many aspects of our lives and are critical in helping us understand and solve some critical social problems such as global warming, species depletion, telehealth, and more. Stankovic’s entry into the arena of real-time systems in the early 80s started with the groundbreaking SPRING project. Before this effort, real-time computing was a small, niche technical area mostly inhabited by theoreticians. Stankovic argued convincingly in his 1988 paper “Misconceptions,” and through his lectures, that real-time computing was an incredibly important discipline and a rich research area. Moreover, he argued that distributed real-time computing should play a key role and that the “distributed” nature introduced significantly greater challenges to real-time computing. Through the SPRING project, Stankovic showed the way forward technically in this area. Subsequently, his focus shifted to wireless sensor networks and he developed VigilNet under the DARPA NEST Program. This consisted of perhaps the largest number of sensor nodes built to that point and was demonstrated at various military bases. This was a significant undertaking and also a high-stakes project. In recent years, Stankovic has been applying sensor networks for mobile health management. In particular, in 2018 he co-founded Link Lab at the University of Virginia, which partners with industry to tackle the most critical questions at the intersection of the cyber and physical worlds.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Stankovic is the Emeritus BP America Professor, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA.
