Jeffrey P. Buzen Wins the 2010
SIGMETRICS Achievement Award
ACM SIGMETRICS is pleased to announce the selection of Dr. Jeffrey P. Buzen as the recipient of the 2010 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award. This prestigious award recognizes his contributions to queuing network modeling and performance evaluation. Dr. Buzen's central server model and convolution algorithm, which he developed while working on his 1971 doctoral thesis at Harvard University, revolutionized the study of queuing network models.
Dr. Buzen further reshaped the field of performance evaluation with his theory of operational analysis, a novel approach to deriving and understanding queuing network formulae that he introduced in 1976.
In 1979, Jeff Buzen received the A. A. Michelson Award for "development of the theory and practice of Operational Analysis, which has provided CPE (Computer Performance Evaluation) practitioners with an accurate yet mathematically simple approach to response time analysis." In 2003, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "contributions to the theory and commercial application of computer system performance models."
From 1971 to 1976, Dr. Buzen taught Computer Science at Harvard University in addition to his work as a Principal Engineer at Honeywell Information Systems. Several of his Ph.D. students at Harvard became famous figures in the computer industry, including Robert M. Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet, John M. McQuillan, who developed adaptive routing algorithms for ARPANET, and Peter P.S. Chen, one of the originators of the Entity-Relationship (ER) data model. In addition, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was an undergraduate student in his Harvard University course on Operating Systems. The company Dr. Buzen co-founded in 1975, BGS Systems, developed a suite of software tools that supported the application of his theories at major data centers worldwide.
Following the acquisition of BGS by BMC Software in 1998, Jeff Buzen has been an independent consultant and researcher. He was a member of the Board of Directors for SIGMETRICS from 1977-1979 and again from 1981-1985. He was also on the Board of Directors for the Computer Measurement Group (CMG) from 1977-1983 and from 2001-2003. In addition, he was Co-Chair for the 1976 ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Conference, Program Chair for the 1978 CMG International Conference, and President of CMG from 1999-2001. His current research, which extends his earlier work on operational analysis, deals with alternative mathematical representations of variability and uncertainty. The primary goal is to categorize and control the riskiness of predictions derived from probabilistic models.
