Victor Frost

Dr. Victor S. Frost is currently the Dan F. Servey Distinguished Professor and has been  chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of Kansas (KU) since 2014.  He was the Director of the KU Telecommunications and Information Technology Center (ITTC)  now (I2S) for over ten years. During that time ITTC had external research expenditures averaging about $5.5 Million/year. From 1987 to 1996 Dr. Frost was the Director of the KU Telecommunications and Information Sciences Laboratory.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the NSF in 1984.

For two years (Feb. 2009-Feb. 2011) he was a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) - Computer Network Systems Division (CNS). As a Program director Dr. Frost contributed to the creation of NSF’s Future Internet Architecture program. 

Dr. Frost has lead several large multi-institution testbeds. From 2007-2010 he led the design and implementation of a Transportation Security Sensor Network (TSSN) for trusted transportation corridors that was demonstrated in wireless field trials in the US and Mexico.  The project involved Kansas City Southern Railway and EDS-an HP company.  From 1994-1998 he also lead the development, deployment of the Advanced ACTS ATM Internetwork (AAI) that provided wide-area ATM connectivity. It connected five Department of Defense (DoD) high-performance computing centers, the Sprint technology and operations center and the MAGIC and ATDnet gigabit testbeds. Practical experiences with a wide area ATM testbed and how these lessons can be applied to performance tuning. Dr. Frost was also a co-investigator on the Rapidly Deployable Radio Network from 1994-1997. The Rapidly RDRN was an architecture and experimental testbed developed to evaluate hardware  and  software  components  suitable  for  implementing mobile,  rapidly  deployable,  and  adaptive  wireless  communications systems.  The RDRN project developed an early Software-Defined Radio prototype built to evaluate key system components.  From 1992-1999 Dr. Frost led KU’s participation in the MAGIC gigabit testbed. The MAGIC testbed, was composed of  an ATM internetwork, a distributed, network-based storage system, and a terrain visualization application, all were designed, implemented, and integrated to create a testbed for demonstrating real-time, interactive exchange of data at high speeds among distributed resources. The major participants in the MAGIC testbed were the Earth Resources Observation System Data Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc., MITRE Corporation, Sprint, SRI International (SRI), and the University of Kansas. Dr. Frost and his student also developed, deployed and field tested a Multi-channel Iridium communication system to support Polar Field Experiments. Dr. Frost (2007-2008) was PI on a Sprint sponsored effort to deploy and test a millimeter-wave gigabit/sec testbed network to explore cost-effective high-bandwidth solutions for cellular backhaul.

 His research has been supported by government agencies, including, NSF, DARPA, Rome Labs, ORNL, ONR and NASA.  Dr. Frost has been involved in research for numerous corporations, including Sprint, NCR, Nortel, Telesat Canada, AT&T, McDonnell Douglas, DEC, and COMDISCO Systems. He has been principal investigator on over thirty five research efforts and involved as co-investigator on over forty projects. As a result of those efforts he has published over 140 journal articles and conference papers. Dr. Frost was listed twice Kansas City Star “Tech 50” in the 2000 and 2002.

Dr. Frost was a member of the Senator Pat Roberts Task Force on Information, Telecommunications and Computing Technology (Spring 2001). He has made several presentations to committees of the Kansas Legislature on telecommunications (1996, 1998, 1999).  He was elected to the IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors as a Member at Large for the 2008-2011 term. He is currently the Associate Editor for Communications Simulation for ACM Transactions on Simulation and Modeling of Computer Systems. Dr. Frost received an Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship, a Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the Society of Automotive Engineers, and the KU School of Engineering Miller Professional Development Awards for Engineering Research and Service in 1986 and 1991 respectively.  He received the KU Louise E. Byrd Graduate Educator Award in 2014. He served as Chairman of the Kansas City section of the IEEE Communications Society from June 1991 to Dec. 1992. He has also served on State of Kansas NSF EPSCoR (1991) and DoD DEPSCoR (1995-1998) committees as well as a Telecommunications Task Force for Kansas Inc..  He was a member of the Board of Trustees for the KU Center for Research Inc. from 1985-2008.  Dr. Frost received the BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from the KU, Lawrence in 1977, 1978, and 1982, respectively.  In 1982 he joined the faculty of the University of Kansas.