Imperial engineer among select few to be honoured by prestigious Belgian society

An Imperial researcher whose work helps to ensure that the cyber world performs reliably and in a timely manner has been recognised internationally.

Imperial’s Professor Erol Gelenbe has been made a Fellow of The Royal Academy, Sciences, Letters and Art of Belgium. The honour recognises his pioneering efforts in the field of modelling of computer systems, and for inspiring several industrial prototypes.

Professor Erol Gelenbe

This year, Professor Gelenbe was one of only 19 new Fellows from around the world to be elected to the Academy.

Professor Gelenbe, from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, said: “I am very touched and honoured, since this class of new Fellows includes a Nobel Laureate and a Fields Medallist, and some other very notable individuals from many disciplines and fields. The Fellowship is also recognition of an area of research that I pioneered and of my industrial impact, which is very gratifying. My family and friends are looking forward to the formal ceremony in Brussels, and I think I will celebrate by having one or two of those famous Belgian beers.”

For the past four decades, Professor Gelenbe’s research has focused on developing programs that can be used in industry to check that computer systems are able to respond in a logical, consistent, reliable and timely manner, helping companies to determine in advance the performance of their systems. These ranged from the early digital switching technologies used by telephone companies to connect phone calls, to today’s advanced mobile telephone signalling systems. He has developed mathematical and simulation models, which can predict how they will perform. This enables industry to pinpoint potential challenges and iron them out well before deployment of the technology.

As a direct result of his research, several industrial products were developed such as FLEXSIM, which is a tool that can simulate flexible manufacturing processes to optimise their performance. His work also led to the development commercial software called and the QNAP/Modline, which predicts the performance of a computer system or network to optimise processes before it is deployed. He also pioneered industrial prototype technologies such as SYCOMORE, which conveyed telephone conversations as packets of information, much as the Internet does today, well before it was conceived. Other developments included the XANTHOS system - the first Ethernet-like local area network running on fibre optics - which was used for reliable communications in facilities such as nuclear power plants. Professor Gelenbe’s current research, amongst other things, focuses on developing so-called nano-networks that use quantum technology, exploiting the “magnetic spin” of electrons to convey information.

Professor Gelenbe will receive his Fellowship at the Palace of the Academy in Brussels on 30 May 2015.