Sztipanovits receives Air Force Meritorious Civilian Service Award Medal for defense projects

Janos Sztipanovits, E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering, received the Air Force Meritorious Civilian Service Award Medal and a Citation at the 2010 banquet of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board Oct. 6 in Arlington, Va.

The Meritorious Civilian Service Award is commonly the second highest award and medal provided to civilian employees within agencies of the federal government of the United States.

Janos Sztipanovits
Janos Sztipanovits (center), wearing the civilian service medal, receives his citation from retired Lieutenant General George Muellner (right), AF SAB Senior Mentor. Left, Dr. John Betz, AF SAB Chair.

Sztipanovits received the honor for service to the Air Force SAB from October 2006 to September 2010. The citation read “Professor Sztipanovits’s leadership as Chair of the Defending and Operating in a Contested Cyber Domain study, and Vice Panel Chair of the 2008 Information Science & Technology Review, his support to the studies on Implications of Cyber Warfare, Virtual Training Technologies, Operating Next-Generation Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Irregular Warfare, as well as the 2006 and 2010 Information Science & Technology Review contributed immensely to the success of those efforts.”

The Meritorious Civilian Service medal is awarded to any Air Force civilian employees having performed their assigned duties for at least one year in an exemplary manner, with a reasonable degree of command-wide mission impact, setting a record of individual achievement and serving as an incentive to others to improve the quality and quantity of their work performance.

As director of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS), Sztipanovits oversees more than $10 million in systems and information science and engineering projects involving more than 100 researchers, staff and graduate students.

Many of these projects engage ISIS and Sztipanovits, professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering, in defense and national security. In 2008 he chaired the study on operational readiness of the U.S. Air Force against cyberattacks. Currently the development of projects on high-confidence system design with defense applications is ongoing, particularly for avionics.

Sztipanovits’ research areas are at the intersection of systems and computer science and engineering. His current research interest is the foundation and applications of model-integrated computing, an emerging model-based design technology for distributed embedded software, which is used in a wide range of defense and commercial systems.

His other research contributions include structurally adaptive systems, autonomous systems, design space exploration and systems-security co-design technology. He has co-authored two books and over 200 papers. He was founding chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Software (SIGBED).

Sztipanovits has received many awards and honors. In June he was elected an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Engineering Sciences Section. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2000. He has received the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service in 2002, the DARPA Service and Achievement award in 2001 and the USAF/AEDC Breakthrough Award in 1993.