Education

PhD: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

MS:  Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 

BSc: University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan 

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Systems Engineering Department at U T Dallas. Prior to that I was a Research Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. I also did my postdoc at the Vanderbilt University (Institute for Software Integrated Systems). My research interests are in networked control systems, cyber-physical systems, resilience and robustness in networked systems, distributed optimization, graph machine learning, and graph-theoretic methods for multiagent systems.

Waseem Abbas

  • ​​July 2022 - I will be teaching Multiagent Robotic Systems (SYSM 6v80.002 / EECS 7v90.002 / MECH 6v29.001) in Fall 2022. [Syllabus]
  • June 2022 - Paper accepted in Automatica (Elsevier). [A. Y. Yazicioglu, M. Shabbir, W. Abbas, and X. Koutsoukos,  "Strong Structural Controllability of Networks: Comparison of Bounds Using Distances and Zero Forcing."] [paper]
  • June 2022 - [Outreach Activity] We held a session "Lets 'Network' and Learn about Networks" in the UT Dallas Future Comets Summer Camp for the 8th and 9th-grade students. [pictures]
  • May 2022 - Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Robotics [J. Li, W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, and X. Koutsoukos, "Byzantine Resilient Distributed Learning in Multi-Robot Systems".] [paper]
  • April 2022 - Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control [A. Akbar, H. Jaleel, W. Abbas, and J. Shamma, "Robustness of Learning in Games With Heterogeneous Players".] [paper]
  • February 2022 - Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control [M. Shabbir, W. Abbas, Y. Yazicioglu, and X. Koutsoukos, "Computation of the Distance-based Bound on Strong Structural Controllability in Networks".] [paper]
  • February 2022 - Paper accepted in American Control Conference (ACC 22), Atlanta, GA. [W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, Y. Yazicioglu, and X. Koutsoukos, "Leader Selection for Strong Structural Controllability in Networks using Zero Forcing Sets".] 
  • January 2022 - I will be teaching Multiagent Robotic Systems (SYSM 6v80.001 / MECH 6v29.001) in Spring 2022.

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  • December 2021 - Paper accepted in the IEEE International Conference on Assured Autonomy (ICAA'22), Puerto Rico. [C. Bhowmick, M. Shabbir, W. Abbas, and X. Koutsoukos,  "Resilient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Using Medoid and Soft-Medoid Based Aggregation"] 
  • September 2021 - Paper accepted in Automatica (Elsevier). [W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, J. Li and X. Koutsoukos,  "Resilient Distributed Vector Consensus Using Centerpoint"] [paper]
  • August 2021 I will be teaching Linear Systems (SYSM 6307 / MECH 6300 / EECS 6331) in Fall 2021.
  • August 2021 - I have joined the Systems Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Dallas as an Assistant Professor.
  • June 2021 - Paper accepted in IEEE Control System Letters. [W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, A.Y. Yazicioglu and X. Koutsoukos,  "Edge Augmentation with Controllability Constraints in Directed Laplacian Networks"] [paper]
  • January 2021 - Paper accepted in the journal (Elsevier) Neurocomputing.  [A. Said, S. Hassan, W. Abbas and M. Shabbir, "NetKI: A Kirchhoff Index Based Statistical Graph Embedding in Nearly Linear Time"] [paper]

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  • November 2020 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.  [A. Mitra, F. Ghawash, S. Sundaram and W. Abbas "On the Impacts of Redundancy, Diversity, and Trust in Resilient Distributed State Estimation"] [paper]
  • October 2020 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. [A.Y. Yazicioglu, W. Abbas and M. Shabbir, "Structural Robustness to Noise in Consensus Networks: Impact of Degrees and Distances, Fundamental Limits, and Extremal Graphs"] [paper]
  • September 2020 - Paper accepted in the 34th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020. [paper]
  • August 2020 - I am teaching CS 2212 - Discrete Structures course in the CS Department (Vanderbilt University).
  • July 2020 - Two papers accepted in the 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2020,  Jeju Island, South Korea. [papers 1 , 2]
  • July 2020 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems. [W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, A.Y. Yazicioglu, A. Akber, "Trade-off Between Controllability and Robustness in Diffusively Coupled Networks"] [paper]
  • May 2020- Paper accepted in the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2020 Conference, Corvallis, OR. [paper]
  • March 2020 - Book chapter to appear in Encyclopedia of Systems and Control, J. Baillieul and T. Samad (Eds.), Springer, London, 2020. [L. Sela, W. Abbas, "Sensing Technologies for Water Distribution Networks".]
  • January 2020 - Paper accepted in the 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) 2020, Singapore (acceptance rate 21%). [paper]
  • January 2020 - Two papers accepted in the American Control Conference (ACC) 2020, Denver, CO. [papers 1 , 2]

 

  • November 2019Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks. [J. Li, W. Abbas, X. Koutsoukos, "Resilient Distributed Diffusion in Networks with Adversaries."] [paper]
  • July 2019 - Three papers accepted in the 58th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2019, Nice, France. [papers 1 , 2 , 3]
  • July 2019 - Happy to join the EECS Department at Vanderbilt University as a Research Assistant Professor.
  • July 2019 - Paper accepted in the Computers & Security (Elsevier) journal. [A. Laszka, W.Abbas, Y. Vorobeychik, 
    X. Koutsoukos, "Detection and Mitigation of Attacks on Transportation Networks as a Multi-Stage Security Game".]
    [paper]
  • July 2019 - Paper accepted in the 8th IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems (NecSys 2019), Chicago, IL [paper]
  • May 2019 - Paper accepted in the Cyber-Physical Systems (Taylor & Francis) journal. [A. Laszka, W.Abbas, Y. Vorobeychik, X. Koutsoukos, "Integrating Redundancy, Diversity, and Hardening to Improve Security of Industrial Internet of Things".]  [paper]
  • May 2019 - Paper accepted in the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Springer) journal. [A. Ghafouri, A. Laszka, W.Abbas, Y. Vorobeychik, X. Koutsoukos, "A Game-Theoretic Approach for Selecting Optimal Time-Dependent Thresholds for Anomaly Detection".] [paper]

Latest

Assistant Professor in Systems Engineering,
Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science,
University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080

Office: ECSN 3.720    Email: waseem.abbas@utdallas.edu
Google Scholar​     

  • October 2024 - Paper accepted in the ​​13th International Conference on Complex Networks [O. U. Ahmad, A. Said, M. Shabbir, X. Koutsoukos, and W. Abbas, "Learning Backbones: Sparsifying Graphs through Zero Forcing for Effective Graph-Based Learning."]
  • September 2024 - Paper accepted in the European Journal of Control (Elsevier) [L. Khalyavin and W. Abbas, "On the Non-resiliency of Subsequence Reduced Resilient Consensus in Multiagent Networks."] [paper]
  • August 2024 - Welcome Jeremy Stufflebeem to the CIRENS lab.
  • August 2024 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems [W. Abbas, "Leaky Forcing in Graphs for Resilient Controllability in Networks."] [paper]
  • June 2024 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering [P. Patel, S. Johir, and W. Abbas, "Distributed Design of Strong Structurally Controllable and Maximally Robust Networks."] [paper]
  • May 2024 - Completed Short-term working Group project for undergraduate students, "From Drones to Wearables - Modern Technologies and Systems Thinking to Solve Societal Problems."
  • April 2024 - Paper accepted in Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, 2024, Chania, Greece
  • January 2024 - Two papers accepted in American Control Conference (ACC), 2024, Toronto, Canada.
  • January 2024 - I am teaching Systems and Control (EE 4310) in Spring 2024.Type your paragraph here.
  • December 2023 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering [O. U. Ahmad, M. Shabbir, W. Abbas, and X. Koutsoukos, "A Graph Machine Learning Framework to Compute Zero Forcing Sets in Graphs."] [paper]
  • November 2023 - Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering [A. Said, O.U. Ahmad, W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, and X. Koutsoukos, "Network Controllability Perspectives on Graph Representation."] [paper]
  • August 2023 - CIRENS lab got NSF grant for the project, "Collaborative Research: Network Control Systems Science for Graph Machine Learning".
  • August 2023 - Welcome Muhammad Usama Zubair to the CIRENS lab.
  • August 2023 - Congratulations to Leon Khalyavin for defending MS thesis on "Non-resilience of Resilience Distributed Consensus in Multiagent Systems". Good luck with your PhD journey at Imperial College, London.
  • July 2023 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2023, Singapore. [paper]
  • June 2023 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems [W. Abbas, M. Shabbir, Y. Yazicioglu, and X. Koutsoukos, "On Zero Forcing Sets and Network Controllability - Computation and Edge Augmentation".] [paper]
  • May 2023 - Paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering [J. Li, W. Wang, W. Abbas, and X. Koutsoukos, "Distributed Clustering for Cooperative Multi-Task Learning Networks".] [paper]
  • May 2023 - Gave an invited talk in the ISYE Department at the University of Oklahoma, "Resiliency in Multiagent Networks from a Geometric Viewpoint - Some Results and Open Directions."
  • May 2023 - Congratulations to Johir Suresh for defending MS thesis on "Distributed Design of Strong Structurally Controllable and Maximally Robust Networks."
  • April 2023 - ​​Congratulations to Priyanshkumar Patel for receiving the Jonsson School of Engineering and
    Computer Science’s Outstanding Graduate Student (Master’s level) award.

  • April 2023 - ​​Paper accepted in ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. [Z. Hassan, S. Ali, I. Khan, M. Shabbir, and W. Abbas, "Computing Graph Descriptors on Edge Streams​​."] [paper]
  • January 2023 - Paper accepted in Neural Computing and Applications (Springer). [A. Said, M. Shabbir, B. Broll, W. Abbas, P. Volgyesi, and X. Koutsoukos, "Circuit Design Completion using Graph Neural Networks".] [paper]
  • January 2023 - Two papers accepted in American Control Conference (ACC), 2023, San Diego, CA. 
  • January 2023 - I am teaching Linear Systems (SYSM 6307 / MECH 6300 / EECS 6331) in Spring 2023.