Yoram Ofek (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

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

Marie Curie Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (; ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), known simply as Marie Curie ( ; ), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was List of female ...

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 accord ...

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

. 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 an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

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

Education and career

Ofek was born in

Kibbutz A kibbutz ( / , ; : kibbutzim / ) is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1910, was Degania Alef, Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economi ...

Ramat David Ramat David () 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 of . History The kibbutz was established in 1926 ...

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. He received his B.Sc. degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

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. () is an Israeli Defense contractor, defense technology company. It was founded as Israel's National R&D Defense Laboratory for the development of weapons and military technology within the Ministry of Defens ...

, and in 1982 at

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Fermilab's Main Injector, two miles (3.3 k ...

. In 1987 he became research staff member at

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

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 ...

Time-driven switching
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 Fellows of the IEEE Academic staff of the University of Trento