Prof. Erol Gelenbe

Biography:

Erol Gelenbe holds the “Dennis Gabor” professorship in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. After a childhood spent in Istanbul and Alexandria (Egypt), he graduated from Ankara College and the Middle East Technical University. He holds a PhD from Polytechnic Institute of New York, and a Doctor of Science from University Pierre et Marie Curie. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and of several National Academies.

His honours include the Commendatore al Merito of Italy and France’s Legion d’Honneur. He was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Rome Tor-Vergata and other institutions. The heart of ICT system performance methodology is based on queueing networks and their computationally efficient “product form” solution. At the INRIA institute and the University of Paris-Orsay, Erol created the team that developed the “Queueing Network Analysis Package”. He invented Diffusion Approximations for computer performance, derived transmission schemes to optimize the throughput of random access communications that are the basis of the well-known MAC and random-access protocols, and established check-pointing schemes for maximizing the reliability of data bases and high performance computers. Then, working at the University of Paris-Descartes and Duke University, he developed new product form queueing networks with negative customers and triggers known as G-networks or “Gelenbe Networks, showing how to mathematically evaluate the performance of ICT systems that incorporate important control functions, such as removing overload and moving work dynamically among servers. He also introduced a new spiked stochastic neural network model known as the Random Neural Network, developed its mathematical solution and learning algorithms, and applied it to both engineering and biological problems, and used it to design the Cognitive Packet Network routing algorithm. Today, we view systems such as Skype as a common means of human communication over the packet based Internet. In 1978, before packet networks were widely available, motivated by the need to improve voice telephony, Erol and a colleague from the company LMT made a major invention (patent filed in 1979 and awarded in 1982) regarding Voice Transmission over a multi-hop packet network, whose detailed architecture was described in a second patent filed by Erol and two colleagues on behalf of Thomson CSF (now Thales) in 1979 (also awarded in 1982).

Erol Gelenbe currently works on the interaction between Energy Consumption and Quality of Service in ICT, and on improving security in Networks. He has graduated over 75 PhD students, and mentored numerous post-doctoral fellows. In 2017 he was awarded the Mustafa Prize for Information Sciences and Technologies.

Title: "The Energy Packet Network Framework for Optimising Energy Consumption with Quality of Service"

Abstract: TBA