Joseph B. Evans

Biographical Sketch

Joseph B. Evans was born in New Jersey in 1961. He received the B.S.E.E. degree from Lafayette College in 1983, and the M.S.E., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1984, 1986, and 1989, respectively.

In 2019, Dr. Evans was appointed the inaugural Technical Director for 5G in the Department of Defense, where he reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

In 2015, Dr. Evans joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a Program Manager in the Strategic Technology Office (STO), where his programs focused on resilient networking and security technologies, RF spectrum sensing and coexistence, and the military use of commercial space sensing.

Dr. Evans joined the faculty at the University of Kansas (KU) in 1989, and eventually was promoted to be the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. From 2008 to 2010, he was also the Director of the Information & Telecommunication Technology Center (ITTC), one of the largest research centers at the University of Kansas, with approximately 170 faculty, staff, and students, and annual expenditures of over $4 million. From 1997 to 2004, Dr. Evans served as Director of the Networking & Distributed Systems Laboratory at ITTC, and he served as Acting Director of ITTC from October 1999 to August 2000. He served as the Director of Research Information Technology for the University of Kansas, reporting to the Vice Provost for Research, from 2005 to 2008, where he was responsible for creating the University's research cyberinfrastructure strategy. Dr. Evans retired from KU in 2019 and is now a Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Dr. Evans served as a Program Director in the Division of Computer and Network Systems, Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2003 to 2005. At NSF, he had oversight responsibility for over $70 million in multi-organizational networking research efforts in wireless networking, cybersecurity, optical networking, and scientific applications. Further, he was responsible for over $50 million in new research and infrastructure awards in newly created programs.

Dr. Evans was a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of NetGames USA, Inc., a network gaming company acquired by Microsoft in 2000; XBox Live, Microsoft's Internet gaming service, utilizes the NetGames USA technology. He was also President and CEO of Ambient Computing, Inc., which developed software and hardware solutions that enable smart wireless environments. Dr. Evans was a partner and Chief Scientist at Ascend Intelligence, LLC, which developed the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR) for DARPA and the US Army, with large deployments in the Iraq and Afghanistan theatres of operation. Ascend Intelligence was acquired by General Dynamics in 2010. He continued to consult as an R&D leader for TIGR at General Dynamics from 2010 to 2014.

Dr. Evans' current research interests include adaptive networking and data technologies, wireless and mobile networking, ubiquitous computing environments, and system implementations.

He has been involved in a variety of networking projects while at KU, ranging from the MAGIC gigabit networking testbed (developing high speed SONET/ATM systems and performing protocol tuning), the ACTS ATM Internet, and the Rapidly Deployable Radio Network project (creating mobile broadband wireless systems) to a collaborative effort with the KU School of Education to deliver K-12 educational resources over the Internet during the early days of the web (students on this project were founding members of Netscape).

Dr. Evans spent the 1996-1997 academic year on sabbatical at Cambridge University and Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory in Cambridge, England, working in the area of mobile computing and communications systems. He participated in the Air Force Summer Research Program at Hanscom AFB in 1991.

Prior to joining the University of Kansas, he held a postdoctoral position in the Network Systems Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he was involved in the design of a high performance integrated network. While at Princeton, he was awarded an AT&T Bell Laboratories Graduate Fellowship for 1984-1988; during this time, he was also a part time employee of Bell Labs, working in the field of speech processing algorithms for packet networks.

Dr. Evans served as a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council from 2012 to 2015. He was a member of the planning group for the NSF Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and co-chair for the GENI Substrate Working Group. He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Software and Information Technology Association of Kansas (SITAKS) from 2008 to 2010.

Dr. Evans is a Fellow of the IEEE, and served as a Member-at-Large on the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Board of Governors for the 2009-2011 term. He served as Vice-Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Sub-Committee on Cognitive Networks, Chair of the Technical Committee on High-Speed Networks, and as Associate Editor of the IEEE Communications Letters, and as Co-Editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine Radio Communications Series from 2006 to 2013. He is also a member of the ACM (SIGCOMM and SIGMOBILE).

Contact: evans @ ittc.ku.edu

Last updated: 28 December 2019