Dr. Sem Borst 2017 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award
ACM SIGMETRICS is pleased to announce the selection of Dr. Sem Borst of Nokia Bell Labs and
the Eindhoven University of Technology as the recipient of the 2017 ACM SIGMETRICS
Achievement Award in recognition of his sustained fundamental contributions to the theory
and applications of performance analysis. Dr. Borst is Full Professor of Stochastic Operations
Research (part-time) at the Eindhoven University of Technology, which position he has held
since 1998. At Nokia Bell Labs, he is a Member of Technical Staff (part-time), which position
he has held since 1996. He received the M.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics from the
University of Twente, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands
in 1994. In the following year he was a visiting scholar at the Statistical Laboratory of the
University of Cambridge, England, and the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research
Department of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. His research interests are in stochastic and
queuing systems, applied probability, performance analysis and resource allocation in
large-scale communication networks. He developed theoretical methods for analyzing queuing
systems in which the workload has heavy-tailed characteristics. He was among the first to
address the role of scheduling in mitigating the effects of long-range dependent and self-
similar traffic. His work has provided new insights on the possible instability of well-known
scheduling algorithms in networks. In the domain of communication networks, his work has
impacted wireless networks of several generations, call centers, packet data switches,
medium-access control, and content delivery networks.
His contributions are distinguished by the substantial extent to which the fundamental and
applied components have each benefitted from his deep involvement in the other. He has
repeatedly shown the ability to participate in the design of new systems, listen to engineers,
create an abstraction amenable to analysis and return with sophisticated analytic tools to aid
the design. He is co-inventor in 28 patents. In the educational field, he has mentored several
researchers, who have gone on to become faculty members in universities in the USA and the
Netherlands. He has numerous awards, which include the Best Paper award from the 1992
ACM SIGMETRICS-Performance conference, INFOCOM 2003, the 2001 Yossef Levy Prize of the
Operations Research Society of Israel, and the 2005 Van Dantzig prize.
Additional information is available on his website: https://www.tue.nl/en/university/departments/mathematics-and-computer-science/the-department/staff/detail/ep/e/d/ep-uid/20001313/.