Robert J. Marks II

Robert Jackson Marks II is an American electrical engineer. 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.

"The Zhao–Atlas–Marks distribution produces a good resolution in time and frequency domains. The ZAMD method reduces the interference resulting from the cross-terms present in multi-component signals. It is useful in resolving close spectral peaks and capturing non-stationary and multi-component signals."

The dispute over the website was covered in the 2008 pro-intelligent design film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

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.

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 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.