Kassas, Zak

Biography

Zak Kassas is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University. He is the director of the Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Laboratory. He is also director of the U.S. Department of Transportation Center: CARMEN (Center for Automated Vehicle Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation), focusing on navigation resiliency and security of highly automated transportation systems. He received a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Lebanese American University, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University, and an M.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He is a recipient of the 2018 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, 2019 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, 2022 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) YIP award, 2018 IEEE Walter Fried Award, 2018 Institute of Navigation (ION) Samuel Burka Award, and 2019 ION Col. Thomas Thurlow Award. He is a Fellow of the ION, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society. His students have won several awards, including two Best Ph.D. Dissertation awards (from IEEE and ION); two US DOT Graduate Student of the Year awards; and 25+ best paper, student paper, and paper presentation awards.

He started his academic career in 2014 at the University of California, Riverside; then was an Associate Professor at University of California, Irvine; then was very early promoted to Full Professor and joined The Ohio State University in 2022. Since starting his academic career, his research has attracted more than $26 million in competitive federal grants from ONR, NSF, AFOSR, DOT, NIST, Sandia National Laboratories, among others. His research was featured in dozens of national and international media outlets (Science, BBC, Forbes, IEEE, ACM, Ars Technica, among others) and appeared on 5 magazine covers. He was a Plenary Speaker at 2018 European Navigation Conference, Sweden and 2022 International GNSS Conference, Australia, and a Keynote Speaker at 2022 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Finland. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and was a Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. He is the Program Chair of IEEE/ION PLANS 2023. He was involved in organizing numerous conferences, workshops, and special sessions at IEEE/ION PLANS, ION GNSS+, ION ITM, IEEE VTC, IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ITSC, ACC, FUSION, and IFAC AAC. His research interests include cyber-physical systems, estimation theory, navigation systems, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems.

 

Expertise

  • Cyber-physical systems
  • Navigation systems
  • Intelligent transportation systems
  • Cognitive sensing and software-defined radio
  • Autonomous vehicles
  • Sensor fusion