Soummya Kar, long time CMU Portugal collaborator, has been named the Buhl Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
Since 2011, Kar has co-advised five CMU Portugal Dual Degree Ph.D. students, three who have graduated and two who are currently enrolled in the Program. He is also the CMU PI for the Large Scale Collaborative Research Project Building Hope (Building Holistic Optimization of Prosumed Energy). In 2020 Kar began a multi-year partnership with REN (Redes Energéticas Nacionais), operator of the national electricity transmission grid and the national natural gas transportation grid in Portugal, aimed to modernize Portugal’s electric infrastructure.
Kar’s research interests include decision-making in large-scale networked systems, stochastic systems, multi-agent systems and data science, with applications in cyber-physical systems and smart energy systems. Kar is a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and, among other honors, won the 2016 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council in the Theory Category.
The College of Engineering plans to celebrate this honor as well as 5 other professorships at a formal ceremony in the coming months.