Joos Vandewalle - Short biography#

Joos Vandewalle was born in Kortrijk, Belgium, in August 1948. He obtained the electrical engineering degree and a doctorate in applied sciences, both from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 1971 and 1976 respectively. From 1976 to 1978 he was Research Associate and from July 1978 to July 1979, he was Visiting Assistant Professor both at the University of California, Berkeley. Since July 1979 he is back at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium where he is Full Professor since 1986 and the head of the SCD division at ESAT, that has more than 150 researchers. From August 1996 to August 1999 and from August 2003 till February 2005 he was Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering. From August 1999 till July 2002 he was the vice-dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In the second semester of 2002-2003 he was on sabbatical leave at the I3S laboratory of CNRS Sophia Antipolis, France. From February 2005 on he is a member of the Governing Board of Science Engineering and Technology at the K.U.Leuven. Since November 2005 he is the coordinator of the Center of Excellence on Optimization in Engineering at the KULeuven.

He teaches courses in linear algebra, linear and nonlinear system and circuit theory, signal processing and neural networks. His research interests are mainly in mathematical system theory and its applications in circuit theory, control, signal processing, cryptography and neural networks. His recent research interests are in nonlinear methods (support vector machines, multilinear algebra) for data processing and optimization techniques.

Joos Vandewalle has authored or coauthored more than 300 international journal papers in these areas. He is the co-author of 4 books and co-editor of 5 books. He supervised about 30 Phd thesis all at the K.U.Leuven. Several of these turned later out to be successful researchers or managers in very diverse fields such as systems and control, biomedical signal processing, information processing, telecom, chemical processing, cryptography, applied mathematics.

He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Circuit Theory and its Applications, Neurocomputing, Neural Networks and the Journal of Circuits Systems and Computers. From 1989 till 1991, he was associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. He was Deputy Editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems part I Fundamental theory and applications from January 2002 till December 2003. Since 2001 he is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Journal on Information Security (IJIS). He was program chairman of ISCAS 2000 in Geneva, and for IJCNN 2004 in Budapest. He was Chairman of the NOLTA conference in Bruges in 2005. He was elected fellow of IEEE in 1992 for contributions to nonlinear circuits and systems and from 2006 till 2010 as Vice-President Technical Activities of the IEEE CAS Society. In 2006 he became Counselor of the IEEE Student Branch Leuven. In 2009 he was elected as Fellow of the European Signal Processing Society EURASIP for contributions to the mathematics of signal processing and machine learning. In 1991-1992 he held the Francqui chair on Artificial Neural Networks at the University of Liège and in 2001-2002 he held this chair on Advanced Data Processing techniques at the Free University of Brussels. He is also Fellow of the IEE (UK). He received several best paper awards and research awards. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and of the Belgian Academy of Sciences and its CAWET committee on engineering and of 2 committees of the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen (Belgium). He is a member of the Technology Committee of the Vlaamse Raad voor WetenschapsBeleid (VRWB). He has been a panel of various Research funds (the Flemish Fund of Scientific Research FWO, ERC panel advanced grants 2008, Signal Processing panel of the Finnish Academy of Sciences evaluation in 2003 and 2006, the German DFG for Centers of Excellence in June 2006) and international research and teaching evaluations (3 departments of Electrical Engineering in the Netherlands, and in November 2005, the Informatics and Communication Systems panel of the EPFL Lausanne in 2000, Engineering departments, Cork University, Ireland, in 2008, the mathematics departments at the three technical universities in the Netherlands in 2009). For the years 2017 and 2018 he was the president of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.