Bruce Hajek

Bruce Hajek is an electrical engineer and academic who has spent his career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he heads the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and holds the Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Chair in Engineering. He is a researcher in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and his work spans communication networking, auction theory, stochastic analysis, combinatorial optimization, machine learning, information theory and bioinformatics. In the early 1980s he led research that proved the stability of dynamically controlled ALOHA multiple access, and with his students he developed algorithms for dynamic routing and transmission scheduling. His analysis of cooling schedules for simulated annealing, which gives a condition for convergence to global minima, is among his most cited results. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 1989, served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and later as president of the IEEE Information Theory Society.