Robert Jackson Marks II (born August 25, 1950) is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist and Distinguished Professor at Baylor University. His contributions include the Zhao-Atlas-Marks (ZAM) time-frequency distribution in the field of signal processing, the Cheung–Marks theorem in Shannon sampling theory and the Papoulis-Marks-Cheung (PMC) approach in multidimensional sampling. He was instrumental in the defining of the field of computational intelligence and co-edited the first book using computational intelligence in the title. A Christian and an old earth creationist, he is a subject of the 2008 pro-intelligent design motion picture, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Professional career
Marks has received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology in 1972 and 1973, respectively. During his doctoral studies at Texas Tech University, he was supervised by J.F. Walkup; his dissertation focused on optical signal processing. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1977.
Marks is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University and serves as the Director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. From 1977 to 2003, he was on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the first president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Neural Networks Council (now the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America.
Technical contributions
Marks is a researcher in the area of electrical engineering.
Treatment of prostate cancer. Marks and his colleagues developed algorithms for real time identification of placement of radioactive seeds in cancerous prostates. For this work, he was a co-recipient of the Judith Stitt Best Abstract Award from the American Brachytherapy Society. The algorithm is used clinically. Optimal detection. In the field of detection theory, Marks and his colleagues developed the first closed form solution for the Neyman–Pearson optimal detection of signals in non-Gaussian noise
Power load forecasting using neural networks. With his colleagues at the University of Washington, Marks was the first to apply an artificial neural network to forecast power demands for utilities in 1991. Six years later neural networks were being used by 32 major North American utilities and remains in common use today. IEEE sponsors a MATLAB based webinar on use of neural networks in load forecasting. A technique "similar to one already used to successfully forecast electrical load needs" has been used to forecast Dow Jones closing values using data from millions of Twitter messages. The Smith Tube. Marks was a member of the Baylor research team that introduced the Smith Tube, a visualization tool useful in advanced microwave systems design. A generalization of the Smith Chart, the Smith Tube is currently in Keysight's Advanced Design System (ADS) software package.