Paul J. Werbos

From The Space Library

Prior to arriving full-time at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1989, Dr. Paul J. Werbos worked since 1979 at the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the Department of Energy. He holds four degrees from Harvard and the London School of Economics. Dr. Werbos has core responsibility for the Adaptive and Intelligent Systems (AIS) area within the Controls, Networks and Computational Intelligence (CNCI) Program of ECS. He is also leading the development of a new Cybersystems thrust within the Integrative Hybrid and Complex Systems (IHCS) program of ECS. He is the ECS representative for the CLEANER initiative, for biocomplexity (MUSES), and for Collaborative Research in Computational NeuroScience. He is one of the two ECS representatives for cyberinfrastructure. Much of the specific research alluded to here is described in detail at www.werbos.com.

Dr. Werbos is an elected member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom) of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, which he represents on the IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee. (See www.ieeeusa.org/policy/energy_strategy.ppt.) He also serves on the AdCom of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, and the Governing Board of the International Neural Network Society (INNS). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has won its Neural Network Pioneer Award, for the discovery of the "backpropagation algorithm" and other basic neural network learning designs. In 2002, he and John Mankins of NASA initiated and ran the NASA-NSF-EPRI initiative on enabling technologies for space solar power (search on "JIETSSP" at www.nsf.gov). In 2003, he participated on the interagency working group for the Climate Change Technology Program. At the 2005 Space Development Conference in Arlington, he was invited to present a new strategy for sustainable exploration and development of space, drawing in part on previous work funded by NSF.