Rate My Professor Robert Shorten

Professor Robert Shorten serves as Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial College London, a role he took up on 1 August 2023 for a five-year term. He joined the institution in 2019 as Chair in Cyber Physical Systems Design and holds the position of Professor of Cyber-physical Systems. His distinguished career includes serving as Professor of Decision Science and Control Theory at University College Dublin, Senior Research Manager at IBM Research Ireland leading the Control and Optimisation Group in the domain of Smart Cities, and co-founder of the Hamilton Institute at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Additionally, he was a Visiting Professor at TU Berlin from 2011 to 2012. Shorten obtained his B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from University College Dublin in 1990 and his Ph.D. degree in 1996.

Shorten's research focuses on smart mobility and smart cities, control theory and dynamics, hybrid dynamical systems, networking, linear algebra, the sharing economy, and DAG-based distributed ledgers. He has co-authored key books such as AIMD Dynamics and Distributed Resource Allocation (SIAM, 2016), which examines the AIMD algorithm central to TCP congestion control, and Electric and Plug-in Vehicle Networks: Optimisation and Control (CRC Press, 2017), addressing optimization in connected vehicles. He also edited Analytics for the Sharing Economy: Mathematics, Engineering and Business Perspectives (Springer, 2019). With over 160 journal publications as of 2020 in leading outlets including IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Automatica, his work spans stability analysis of switched systems, congestion control protocols, positive systems, vehicle platooning, and smart grid applications. Shorten contributes to professional bodies as a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Technical Group on Smart Cities, IFAC Technical Committees for Automotive Control and Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems, and was the Irish representative on the European Union Control Association assembly from 2016 to 2019. He currently acts as interim Director of the Centre for Sectoral Economic Performance at Imperial College London.