Erol Gelenbe Wins the 2008
SIGMETRICS Achievement Award
ACM SIGMETRICS is pleased to announce the selection of Dr. Erol Gelenbe of Imperial College, London, as the recipient of the 2008 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award.
Dr. Erol Gelenbe (FACM, FIEEE, FIEE) has been characterized as the single individual who, over a span of 30 years, has made the greatest overall contribution to the field of Computer System and Network Performance Evaluation through original research, mentoring and doctoral training, creation and direction of world class research groups, wide ranging international collaboration, and professional service. He holds the "Dennis Gabor Chair" at Imperial College, and his papers in 2007-2008 appear in the ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Neural Computation, Performance Evaluation, Physical Review, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, and The Computer Journal. He has made decisive contributions to product form networks by inventing G-networks (Gelenbe-Networks) with totally new types of "negative customers, triggers, and resets", and which are characterised by non-linear traffic equations. He has made seminal contributions to random access communications, the optimisation of reliability in database systems, the design of adaptive QoS-aware packet networks, diffusion models in performance analysis, and the performance of link control protocols. His honours include: Commander of Merit of the Republic of Italy, Grand Officer of the Star of Italy, Officer Order of Merit of France and Chevalier des Palmes Académiques. He is a Member of the French National Academy of Engineering, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, and Academia Europaea. He received the Science Award (1994) of the Parlar Foundation in Turkey, and he was the first computer scientist to be awarded the Grand Prix France Telecom (1996) of the French Academy of Sciences. He received "honoris causa" doctorates from the University of Rome II (1996), Bogaziçi University, Istanbul (2004), and the University of Liège, Belgium.
A native of Turkey, he graduated from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and has authored four books written in English and French, two of which have appeared in Japanese and Korean translation, and over 115 journal articles in the Journal of the ACM, Physical Review, Acta Informatica, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Management Science, IEEE Trans. on Computers, IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks, IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Systems Man and Cybernetics, IEEE J. on Selected Areas in Communications, ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks, Communications of the ACM, Journal of Applied Probability, and Theoretical Computer Science, etc.. His recent work includes path finding algorithms in noisy and uncertain conditions, networked auctions, the use of neural networks to control routing in computer networks, as well as theoretical biology and theoretical chemistry including the analysis of neural networks and gene regulatory networks. His research is currently funded by industry (GD, BAE Systems and QinetiQ), and agencies including EPSRC, MoD and DoD, and the EU FP6 and FP7 Programmes.
A founder of IFIP WG7.3 and of ACM SIGMETRICS, and of the journal Performance Evaluation, Erol is particularly proud of the 58 PhD students he has graduated, many of whom are prominent in academia and industry in France, the USA, Turkey, Greece, UK, Canada, Belgium and Venezuela. Appointed to a chair at the age of 27 at the University of Liège in Belgium, he founded performance modelling at INRIA and in French Universities. His professorial posts include the University of Paris-Orsay, the University of Paris-Descartes, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of Central Florida. He is now Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal (British Computer Society), and serves on the editorial board of several journals. Erol is currently a member of the Science and Technology Board and of the Executive Board of the UK Defence Technology Centre on Data and Information Fusion. His experience includes being Department Head at Duke University, Associate Dean at the University of Central Florida, and chairing the Technical Advisory Board of the US Army's Simulation and Training Command (1999-2003).
For more information about Dr. Gelenbe, please visit his website: http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/gelenbe/.
