Tassiulas wins ACM eEnergy Test of Time Award

The paper, written with Iordanis Koutsopoulos, addressed a central challenge in smart grid design: how to optimally schedule consumer power demands in real time to minimize grid operational costs. The authors developed a mathematical framework in which a grid operator receives power demand requests – each with different power requirements, durations, and deadlines – and devised scheduling policies to minimize costs as a function of total instantaneous consumption. The work drew on techniques from control theory, stochastic optimization, and communications networking, and has since become a foundational reference in the smart grid research community.

Tassiulas's research interests are in the field of computer and communication networks, with emphasis on fundamental mathematical models and algorithms of complex networks, architectures and protocols of wireless systems, sensor networks, and novel internet architectures. He is widely recognized for foundational contributions to networking theory, including the max-weight scheduling algorithm and the back-pressure network control policy. He has been previously awarded the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award, the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award, and the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM.