The American Automatic Control Council has selected Behrouz Touri, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California San Diego, to receive the 2018 Donald P. Eckman Award. He will be recognized “for outstanding contributions to stochastic methods applied to distributed and networked control systems.”

The award is given annually to an outstanding engineer under the age of 35 in the field of automatic control. Touri will receive the award at the American Control Conference on June 28, 2018 in Milwaukee, WI.

Touri’s research aims to provide a fundamental understanding of behaviors in interconnected random network systems. Applications of his work include studying opinion dynamics over random networks; studying team formation in a network of swarm robots; analyzing network influence in social networks with random connectivities; and designing mechanisms for efficient power grids.

Using tools from probability theory, control theory and dynamical systems, Touri’s work has helped drive advances in characterizing the asymptotic behavior and control of random networked systems. Noteworthy developments of his work include the infinite flow theory for the asymptotic behavior of averaging dynamics and proof of universality and controllability of large network systems using several control mechanisms. Touri’s contributions also include discovering the connection between stochastic stability and evolutionarily stable strategies in population games.