Honouring the work of Professor Erol Gelenbe

A symposium was held 21-25 September 2015 honouring the work of Professor Erol Gelenbe, Dennis Gabor Professor in the Department.

The event addressed the areas in which Erol has been active in various stages of his career: Science and Engineering Policy, Stochastic Networks, Computer and Network Quality of Service, Machine Learning and Bioinformatics.

The symposium was inaugurated by Imperial's Provost, Professor James Sterling FRS, and attracted some 125 scientists and engineers from the USA, Belgium, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Egypt, and the UK.

Erol has been Head of our Department's Intelligent Systems and Networks (ISN) research group since 2004. His contributions to Imperial can be best summarised by the fact that in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework evaluation of UK universities, Imperial's EEE Dept. was ranked 1st in its field and the ISN Research Group was identified as having the "largest proportion of world leading outputs" in our Department.

In 2008, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Erol its SIGMETRICS Life-Time Achievement Award for performance optimisation of computer systems and networks stating that he was "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."

In 2010 he was awarded the IET (UK) Oliver Lodge Medal as "a true IT innovator" recognising his pivotal mathematical models such as G-Networks, used to analyse the performance of computing systems and networks with control functions, and the "deep learning" Random Neural Network used in the design of smart routing algorithms for the Internet.

A Fellow of IEEE, ACM and the IET, and the recipient of Imperial's Rector's Research Award in 2008, Erol is an elected Fellow of the Science Academies of Belgium, Hungary, Poland and his native Turkey. Awarded the "Grand Prix France Telecom" in 1996 for his research on Internet Protocols, Erol is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering of France. His recent study on the effect of Information Technology on Energy Consumption and Carbon Emissions was contributed to the COP21 Climate Change Conference in Paris.

On 26 June 2014, Mme Fioraso (French Secretary of State for Research) awarded Erol the honour of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France's highest decoration that was established by Napoleon in 1802 to recognise individual merit rather than birthright.

Professor Gelenbe's achievements are not limited to his own research. The Math Genealogy Project of the American Mathematical Society ranks him among the Top 50 most prolific PhD supervisors of all time in the mathematical sciences, and he is also highly regarded by our students for his classroom teaching.