Yaakov Bar-Shalom was born in Romania and he emigrated to Israel with his family at the age of nineteen.

[1] He earned his Bachelor's and master's degree both in Electrical Engineering from Technion in Haifa, Israel.

He is the recipient of the 2012 Connecticut Medal of Technology for his work in improving the sensitivity of remote sensors used for surveillance in the presence of background noise or clutter.

[1] Anthony J. DeMaria, recipient of the 2004 Connecticut Medal of Technology and Chief Scientist at Coherent-DEOS, LLC, has stated that Yaakov Bar-Shalom is regarded as the "chief architect of probability-based methods for estimating the paths of moving objects.

Bar-Shalom is recipient of IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Member Award (1987);[4] UConn AAUP Award for Excellence in Research (1988); J. Mignona Data Fusion Award from the DoD JDL Data Fusion Group (2002); IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal for Radar Technologies and Applications (2008);[5] Connecticut Medal of Technology (2012).