Biography

Brian Anderson obtained undergraduate qualifications in mathematics and electrical engineering at the University of Sydney and a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University. He was an engineering Professor and then Distinguished Professor at ANU until retiring in 2016 and becoming an Emeritus Professor. He had earlier held faculty positions at Stanford University and University of Newcastle in electrical engineering, and over several years beginning in 2002 he was President and then Chief Scientist of National ICT Australia. He served on a number of Australian government bodies, including the Prime Minister’s Science Council under three prime ministers, and company boards including Cochlear Ltd, the world’s largest supplier of cochlear implants. 

He was President of the International Federation of Automatic Control from 1990 to 1993 and President of the Australian Academy of Science from 1998 to 2002. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He has been awarded numerous prizes for work in control systems, circuit theory and signal processing, and has received a number of honorary doctorates, including from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and ETH, Zurich. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993 and made a Companion in 2016. He received the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Neck Ribbon in 2007.

Research

For some time, I have been studying questions related to multi-agent systems, such as a collection of drones. A current focus of my multi-agent system research is to understand how to address questions such as: How many layers should there be in the Australian Army? Why is having six layers of government appropriate for China, while there are three for Australia? Roughly how many members should comprise the board of a company?

These are questions about hierarchies, which are social entities in which such engineering concepts as sensing, communication, optimization, and uncertainty are central. The principles of dimensioning hierarchies and establishing the optimum architectures for achieving overall organizational goals are motivating a substantial research effort.

Interests

Professor Anderson's research interests have spanned many topics in circuits, signal processing and control, and currently his work focuses on distributed control of multiagent systems, localization, social networks, and control aspects of epidemics.