Rate My Professor Waseem Abbas

Waseem Abbas is an Assistant Professor of Systems Engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas, a position he has held since August 2021. Previously, he was a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University from July 2019, following a postdoctoral appointment at Vanderbilt's Institute for Software Integrated Systems. Abbas received his PhD and MS degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and his BSc degree from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, Pakistan.

Abbas's research focuses on networked control systems and cyber-physical systems, emphasizing the resilience and robustness of critical infrastructure networks against faults and strategic attacks through game-theoretic and graph-theoretic approaches. His interests include distributed control and coordination of multiagent systems, exploiting network topology for global objectives via local interactions, distributed optimization, graph machine learning, and graph-theoretic methods for multiagent systems. Applications encompass controllability and robustness of networked systems, optimal resource allocation in heterogeneous systems, energy-efficient scheduling in wireless sensor and actor networks, intrusion detection using resource-bounded monitors, coverage problems, and resilient sensor placement algorithms for cyber-physical systems. He leads the Laboratory for Control, Intelligence, and Resilience in Networks and Systems (CIRENS Lab) at UT Dallas. Abbas has authored numerous publications in leading journals, including "On Zero Forcing Sets and Network Controllability - Computation and Edge Augmentation" (IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2023), "Byzantine Resilient Distributed Learning in Multi-Robot Systems" (IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2022), "Resilient Distributed Diffusion in Networks with Adversaries" (IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, 2019), and recent works such as "Leaky Forcing in Graphs for Resilient Controllability in Networks" (IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2024). In recognition of his teaching excellence, he was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award by the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science in April 2025.