Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University

Biography

Prof Anderson is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University.

He was the inaugural CEO of NICTA, established by the Australian Government through the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts and the Australian Research Council under the Information and Communication Technologies Centre of Excellence program.

From 2003 to 2006, Prof Anderson was the Chief Scientist at NICTA. He has held many visiting appointments in the USA, Europe, and Asia, including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Tokyo Institute of Technology.

From 1994 to 2002, he was Director of the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering at ANU, following a post as Professor and Head of the Department of Systems Engineering. Prof Anderson was Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Newcastle, prior to which he worked in industry in the USA and at Stanford University.

Prof Anderson has served as a member of a number of government bodies, including the Australian Science and Technology Council and the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He was also a member of the Board of Cochlear Limited, the world's major supplier of cochlear implants from 1995 to 2005.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia. In 1989, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, and in 2002 a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering. Prof Anderson was President of the International Federation of Automatic Control for the triennium 1990 to 1993, and served as President of the Australian Academy of Science for four years from 1998 to 2002.

His research interests have included many contributions in the area of circuits, signal processing and control, and currently his work focuses on distributed control of multiagent systems, sensor network localisation, adaptive and nonlinear control.

Prof Anderson holds honorary doctorates of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales and Newcastle. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993.

Prof Anderson undertook his undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at Sydney University and his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.