Yoram Ofek (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

: יורם אופק; September 25, 1950 – December 9, 2009) was a

Marie Curie Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie ( , , ; born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first ...

Chair and full professor in the Information Engineering and Computer Science Department at the

University of Trento The University of Trento (Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Trento'') is an Italian university located in Trento and nearby Rovereto. It has been able to achieve considerable results in didactics, research, and international relations accor ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

. He was the inventor of 45 US and European patents and published more than 120 journal and conference papers. He invented several novel architectures for networking, computing and storage. He was elected

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...

Fellow in 2006 for his contributions to switching, scheduling and synchronization in data networks.

Education and career

Ofek was born in Kibbutz

Ramat David Ramat David ( he, רָמַת דָּוִד, ''lit.'' David Heights) is a kibbutz in northern Israel. Located in the Jezreel Valley near Ramat David Airbase, it falls under the jurisdiction of Jezreel Valley Regional Council. In it had a population ...

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

. He received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. In 1979 Yoram Ofek was a researcher at

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. ( he, רפאל - מערכות לחימה מתקדמות בע"מ, formerly Rafael Armament Development Authority), ("Rafael" from Hebrew acronym of "Authority for the Development of Armaments" - ) is an Israel ...

, and in 1982 at

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operat ...

. In 1987 he became research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. In 1998 Prof. Ofek and Prof. Mario Baldi founded Synchrodyne Networks, a company that developed switching technology for the Internet. He became the Marie Curie Chair and full professor at the

in 2004, where he also taught graduate and master level courses.

Research

Prof. Ofek was directing IP-FLOW (a

recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...

for "IP FLows over Optical and Wireless"). The focus of IP-FLOW was the flow control of IP packets over the Internet.

Awards

*IEEE Fellow. *IEEE ICC-007 ONS Best Paper Award: "Scalable Switching Testbed not 'Stopping' the Serial Bit Stream," (with D. Agrawal, M. Baldi, M. Corra, G. Fontana, G. Marchetto, V. T. Nguyen, D. Severina, T. H. Truong). *IEEE ICC-2009 - Best Paper Award (First International Workshop on Green Communications): "Time for a 'Greener' Internet," (with Mario Baldi). *IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for his invention of the MetaRing architecture and his contributions to the SSA storage products. *IBM Research Division Award for developing the PARIS high-speed networking prototype system. *Four IBM Invention Achievement Awards. *Three IBM External Honors. *Three commendations of excellence for his research at Rafael.

Articles about some of Yoram Ofek's inventions

Pipeline forwarding Pipeline forwarding (PF) applies to packet forwarding in computer networks the basic concept of '' pipelining'', which has been widely and successfully used in computing — specifically, in the architecture of all major central processing units (C ...

Time-driven switching In Telecommunication and Computer networking, time-driven switching (TDS) is a node by node time variant implementation of Circuit switching, where the propagating datagram is shorter in space than the distance between source and destination. With T ...

Fractional lambda switching
Time-driven priority

References

External links

Prof. Ofek's homepage at the University of Trento

Remembering Yoram Ofek

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ofek, Yoram Israeli scientists Italian computer scientists 1950 births 2009 deaths Fellow Members of the IEEE Academic staff of the University of Trento