Hostname: page-component-6898cfcb55-kwdml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-11T10:54:46.246Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

First Impressions of a Young Turk. Introductory Remarks to the Gelenbe 2015 Symposium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2017

Mania Pavella
Mania Pavella*
Affiliation:
Emeritus Professor of Power Systems, Institut Montefiore, University of Liège, Belgium
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

These remarks constitute an introduction to this special issue and were made on 21 September 2015, at the opening of a special symposium honouring Professor Erol Gelenbe at Imperial College London, UK. Gelenbe is a Computer Scientist and Computer Engineer, who has been a Fellow of Academia Europaea since 2005. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters of Belgium, as well as of the Science Academies of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, and of the National Academy of Technologies of France.

Information

Type
In Honour of Erol Gelenbe
Information
European Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , May 2017, pp. 171 - 174
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2017 

1. Introduction

This ceremony, on Erol’s 70th anniversary offers me a good opportunity to reminisce with some pleasant memories that date back to the early 1970s. More precisely, it was in October 1971 when I first met with a young Turk – and this was you, dear Erol, and this was over 40 years ago! Let me recall some mutual souvenirs, and also mention some other personal ones that I had never talked to you about.

In 1971, when colleagues of the University of Liège learnt about my trip to the United States, they asked me to gather information about Erol Gelenbe, a young researcher who had recently applied for a professorship at the Department of Computer Science of the Montefiore Institute of the University of Liège. The most interested among the colleagues was the late Danny Ribbens who was holding the then only chair of Computer Science in Liège.

The main purpose of my trip was my participation in the Allerton Conference, an annual conference well known to the specialists, mainly organized by the Coordinates Science Laboratory (CSL) of the University of Illinois, at Urbana Champaign. Prior to the Conference, I was invited by Professor Petar Kokotovic to visit CSL and deliver a seminar talk.

Upon my arrival in Illinois, and on my request, the noted Control Theorist Petar Kokotovic kindly went to his telephone in order to enquire about Gelenbe. He rapidly came back with extremely laudatory recommendations: undoubtedly, Gelenbe was a brilliant, top-level and very promising young scientist. My duty to bring back to Liège the required information was thus accomplished. And while preparing my own presentations, I lost sight of Erol Gelenbe.

2. Our Meetings at the Allerton Conference and Ann Arbor in 1971

Some days later, the Allerton Conference got started, as always, in Allerton House, an elegant mansion surrounded by gorgeous woods. However, being a relatively inexperienced postdoc, I was fully absorbed by my session, so I didn’t have time to fully enjoy such charming conditions.

Nevertheless, while going around during the coffee break of the first day, I noticed a large group of participants surrounding a young researcher and asking him many and various questions. I was surprised by the lively tone of the conversations. But even more so, I was impressed by the reactions of the young fellow who sometimes would answer right away and at other times would say: ‘look, I only have two arms, two legs and no time left to explore further in this direction – at least for the moment’. His enthusiasm, his ability to attract attention, his quick and brilliant reactions, the interest and even the respect shown by the audience were truly amazing, and at the same time very refreshing.

My astonishment and interest dramatically increased when I learnt that this chap was Erol Gelenbe! I thus went up to him and introduced myself. His reaction was immediate: why don’t you come to visit us in Ann Arbor? I gladly accepted his invitation right away.

So, some days later, Erol came to pick me up at the bus stop of the Greyhound Line; he took me for a tour of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and showed me the beautiful surroundings. Also, he invited me to his home for lunch the next day. Meeting with his wife Deniz has been another marvellous happening. And her warm hospitality made me feel at home. For the lunch, the Gelenbes had also hosted another guest, Dennis Tsichritzis, who I had never met before. So, the lunch brought together two Turks and two Greeks. This also was yet another new experience to me. It took place under charming circumstances and was an enjoyment throughout. Unforgettable memories… This was the beginning of a long-long friendship with Erol Gelenbe.

3. The Later Years

Ever since 1971, I have had many opportunities to see Erol in Liège, Paris, London or the States. This brought us closer to each other and gave me the chance to appreciate many admirable facets of his personality. Above all, Erol has kept intact his enthusiasm, his open-mindedness, his curiosity, his willingness to discuss other people’s problems and ability to shed light in matters not necessarily in his own areas of expertise. Unfortunately, he still has only two arms and two legs; fortunately however, he has managed to broaden his time scale so as to accomplish in 24 hours tasks for which others would need more than 48. And his ability to attract young students, post-docs and researchers has even increased. He has graduated 73 PhDs including 17 women, and 17 at Imperial College, placing him among the Top 50 PhD advisers of all times in the mathematical sciences (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/extrema.php). He has held chairs in four countries including the University of Paris, Duke University and Imperial College, London, in addition to Liège.

Dear Erol, once again let me express my pleasure for having had the opportunity to recall good memories. I know many experts in your area of proficiency will be pleased to praise your professional achievements. Yet another person – your friend Danny Ribbens, who held the first Chair of Computer Science at the University of Liège – would have loved to highlight your outstanding skills. Unfortunately, he is missing, and we do miss him. But I trust that from where he may be, he joyfully cheers you.

Mania Pavella is an internationally recognized expert in the area of large-scale Electrical Power Systems and the distribution of electrical energy, she was elevated to Life Fellow of the IEEE and is the proponent of a Comprehensive Approach to Transient Stability Assessment and Control of Power Systems. She received her Engineer’s Diploma and then her PhD from the Institut Montefiore of the University of Liège in Belgium, and after occupying various research positions and an Associate Professorship, she became Professor of the University of Liège at the Montefiore Institute in 1978. She is currently an Emeritus Professor at the same university. Much of her work was carried out in the research unit in Systems and Modelling at the Montefiore Institute, which is active in areas including machine learning, dynamical systems, control and optimization, electric power systems, and bioinformatics. Together with her research team she has proposed innovative deterministic and Artificial Intelligence based large-scale system methods for the operation and control of power systems, including the SIME method for transient stability analysis and control (both preventive and emergency) and various methods for dynamic security assessment. She is the author or co-author of several monographs, book chapters and over 250 papers.

References

Erol Gelenbe’s publications before joining the University of Liège, and a few from 2015 and 2016, showing the range of topics and how they have changed over time

1. Gelenbe, E. (1969) Probabilistic automata with structural restrictions. SWAT (FOCS)’69 (10th Annual Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory), Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 15–17 October 1969. IEEE Computer Society 1969, pp. 90–99.Google Scholar
2. Gelenbe, E. (1970) On languages defined by linear probabilistic automata. Information and Control, 16, pp. 487–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. Gelenbe, E. (1970) On the loop-free decomposition of stochastic finite-state systems. Information and Control, 17(5), pp. 474–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4. Gelenbe, E. (1971) A realizable model for stochastic sequential machines. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C–20(2), pp. 199–204.Google Scholar
5. Gelenbe, E. and Rossi, N. (1971) Uniform modular realisations and linear machines. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C–20(12), pp. 1616–1617.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. Gelenbe, E. (1971) The 2/3 rule for dynamic storage allocation under equilibrium. Information Processing Letters, 1(2), pp. 59–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7. Gelenbe, E. and Tiberio, P. (1972) Multiprogrammazione e memoria virtuale. Alta Frequenza, XLI(7), 487–503.Google Scholar
8. Gelenbe, E. (1973) The distribution of a program in primary and fast buffer storage. Communications of the ACM, 16(7), pp. 431–434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. Gelenbe, E. (1973) An unified approach to the evaluation of a class of replacement algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C–22(6), pp. 611–618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10. Gelenbe, E., Boekhorst, J. and Kessels, J. (1973) Minimizing wasted space in partitioned segmentation. Communications of the ACM, 16(6), pp. 343–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11. Gelenbe, E., Tiberio, P. and Boekhorst, J. (1974) Page size in demand paging systems. ACM-SIGMETRICS, First Symposium on System Performance Evaluation, also in Acta Informatica, 3(1), pp. 1–23.Google Scholar
12. Gelenbe, E., Lenfant, J. and Potier, D. (1974) Analyse d’un algorithme de gestion simultané mémoire centrale-disque de pagination. Acta Informatica, 3, pp. 321–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13. Fayolle, G., Gelenbe, E., Labetoulle, J. and Bastin, D. (1974) The stability problem of broadcast packet switching networks. Acta Informatica, 4, pp. 49–53.Google Scholar
14. Akinwande, O.J., Bi, H. and Gelenbe, E. (2015) Managing crowds in hazards with dynamic grouping. IEEE Access, 3, pp. 1060–1070.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15. Gelenbe, E. (2015) Synchronising energy harvesting and data packets in a wireless sensor. Energies, 8(1), pp. 356–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16. Gelenbe, E. (2015) Errors and power when communicating with spins. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 3(4), pp. 483–488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17. Brun, O., Wang, L. and Gelenbe, E. (2016) Big data for autonomic intercontinental overlays. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Communications, 34(3), pp. 575–583.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18. Gelenbe, E. and Ceran, E.T. (2016) Energy packet networks with energy harvesting. IEEE Access, 4, pp. 1321–1331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19. Gorbil, G., Abdelrahman, O.H., Pavloski, M. and Gelenbe, E. (2016) Modeling and Analysis of RRC-Based Signalling Storms in 3G Networks. IEEE Transactions on. Emerging Topics Computing, 4(1), pp. 113–127.Google Scholar