by David F. Salisbury
A couple years from now, if you are walking through the atrium in Featheringhill Hall and see a model helicopter flitting over your head, there is a good chance that John Koo — or one of his computers — will be at the controls.

T. John Koo is a new assistant professor in electrical engineering and computer science who comes to Vanderbilt from University of California-Berkeley, where he served as a visiting professor for the last two years. His specialty is the control of autonomous vehicles.

As a doctoral student at Berkeley, Koo spearheaded the university’s first entry into the Aerial Robotics competition hosted by Georgia Tech and, as a visiting professor, became a key participant in the resulting Aerobot research project, which developed algorithms and formal methods to design systems capable of controlling model helicopters during takeoff, landing and formation flying.

Now that Koo is at Vanderbilt, he intends to expand his area of research to robot vehicles of all types. He will be working closely with researchers at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) in an area known as hybrid and embedded systems. These are the kinds of systems proliferating madly through modern society that integrate networked computers with other devices, such as cell phones, embedded computers that control automobile engines and a variety of different “smart” appliances.

Koo’s expanded focus will allow him to develop automatic control systems for other kinds of vehicles in addition to helicopters. This will allow him to combine his research with his childhood interest with remotely controlled cars, which he raced avidly as a boy. Model car racing was one of the distractions that interfered with his studies when Koo was growing up in Hong Kong. “I didn’t do very well in school. I was just an average student because I was too easily distracted,” he acknowledges.

Thanks to an active and energetic middle school teacher named Mr. Chan, however, Koo became very interested in math and science and pulled his grades up. But, as an undergraduate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, his grades dropped once again. This time the distraction was athletic: He became a member of the university’s championship tennis team.

“Again I was lucky,” says Koo. “I met professor C. P. Kwong, who didn’t mind my GPA but saw that I could be self-motivating. He gave me a chance to continue my studies in a master’s degree program in the philosophy of information engineering.” There he studied subjects like neural networks and fuzzy logic. These are types of mathematics inspired by nature and designed to deal with imprecise information in ways similar to those used by the human mind. During this time, he helped organize an international conference which brought a lot of the important figures in the field, including Lotfi Zadeh, a professor from UC Berkeley considered to be the father of fuzzy logic, to Hong Kong.

With Zadeh’s encouragement, Koo came to the U.S. for his doctorate, first at the University of Southern California and then transferring to UC -Berkeley. “Even though I was born and raised in Hong Kong, I always have had my eyes turned outward to the world,” Koo says. After obtaining his doctorate under the supervision of professor Shankar Sastry, he did a brief post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to California to serve as a visiting professor at Berkeley.

Koo decided to come to Vanderbilt for several reasons. He had worked with Janos Sztipanovits, the director of ISIS, and his colleagues and was impressed with their approach to embedded software systems. Working with them, he sees an opportunity to make an impact on society by creating design tools that will make it possible to manufacture safer and more reliable automobiles and aircraft. He also found that he liked Vanderbilt and Nashville as well. “I had not been to Nashville before I came to interview. Once I arrived, I liked the campus a lot. Around Vanderbilt, the environment is nice and safe. The people are very friendly and helpful. And it is not only about country music: there are all kinds of music in the city. You can see that Vanderbilt is a place where things are really happening.”

Posted 9/22/03 at 10:00 a.m.