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.

Evolutionary Informatics Lab website

In 2006 Marks hired William Dembski as a part-time post-doctoral researcher; Dembski is an intelligent design proponent and former Baylor staff member at the heart of a previous intelligent design controversy at Baylor over the Michael Polanyi Center's promotion of intelligent design, which had been resolved when Baylor disbanded that center in 2000. Dembski's position in Marks' lab was funded by a $30,000 gift from the Lifeworks Foundation; the gift went through the university's development department and not its academic grant administration. Dembski's role was stated in the gift documents. Marks said that he kept Dembksi's presence quiet. By December 2006 Dembski's university position had been brought to the university administration's attention, and the university returned the unspent funds and terminated Dembski's position. Marks created a website to describe the work that he and Dembski were doing, which the website described as happening at the "Evolutionary Informatics Lab" at Baylor. In the summer of 2007 that website was called to the attention of the Baylor administration after Marks discussed that work on a podcast hosted by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, and the university administration shut the website down. Marks challenged the removal. The site was reposted to a server outside of Baylor. The dispute over the website was covered in the 2008 pro-intelligent design film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Christianity

Marks served as the faculty adviser to the University of Washington's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ for seventeen years. He has presented his talk "What Does Calculus Have to Do with Christianity?" in Poland, Japan, Canada, Russia, and the United States. Marks has made science-oriented Christian apologetics presentations. Venues include Poland, Japan, Moscow, Canada, and Siberia.

Other activities

Books by Robert J. Marks II