Professors in History and Electrical and Electronics Engineering Departments Recognized

 

Prof. Erdal Arıkan Named IEEE Fellow

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Prof. Erdal Arıkan an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to coding theory. Prof. Arıkan, of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE), also received the IEEE Information.

Theory Paper Award in 2010, for "Channel Polarization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels," published in the July 2009 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

With more than 350,000 members, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional
organization. Promotion to its Fellow rank is one of the highest honors that the IEEE can bestow upon an individual. Given that fewer than 0.1 percent of IEEE members worldwide are honored with this title annually, this is a very elite group.

Prof. Arıkan joined the faculty of Bilkent University in 1987 after a brief period as assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his BS degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1981 and his MS and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1986, all in electrical engineering.

Bilkent faculty members to have previously received IEEE Fellow status are Prof. Özay Oral (1995), Prof. Abdullah Atalar (2006), Prof. Levent Onural (2007), Prof. Levent Gürel (2008) and Prof. Ahmet Enis Çetin (2009).

 

 

Prof. Levent Gürel Elected ACES Fellow

Three times is the charm! Following his elevation to the Fellow rank by the Electromagnetics Academy in 2007 and by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2009, Prof. Levent Gürel of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) has been elected as a Fellow of the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES).

As the name indicates, ACES is a scientific, literary and educational society that strives for the advancement of theory, computation, practice and applications in electromagnetics. Each year, fewer than 1 percent of ACES members are elevated to the rank of Fellow for their exceptional achievements in applied computational electromagnetics.

Prof. Gürel has been conducting cutting-edge research in parallel computing in electromagnetics, iterative and parallel solvers and preconditioners for extremely large matrix equations, and solutions to the world's largest integral-equation problems.

He also serves as director of the Bilkent University Computational Electromagnetics Research Center (BiLCEM). Since 2006, BiLCEM researchers have been setting world records by solving extremely large problems in computational electromagnetics. The ultimate benefit is finding solutions to previously intractable scientific and real-life problems in many important areas, of which medical imaging, wireless communications, remote sensing and optics are only a few.

Prof. Gürel is an associate editor of several academic journals in his field. He is also serving as guest editor of a special issue of the ACES Journal, and delivered the plenary address at ACES's 2011 international conference in March.

Earlier this year, Prof. Gürel was named an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for 2011-13, providing the opportunity for him to share his expertise in computational electromagnetics with researchers all over the world. Among the marks of recognition he has received in Turkey, two prestigious awards from the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) in 2002 and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) in 2003 are the most notable.

 

 

Prof. İnalcık Awarded His Twenty-second Honorary Doctorate

Prof. Halil İnalcık has recently received his twenty-second honorary doctorate, presented by Rector Fahrettin Keleştemur of Erciyes University in Kayseri on November 22.

Prof. İnalcık, widely considered to be the world's leading scholar in the field of Ottoman history, founded Bilkent's Department of History in 1993 after having retired from the University of Chicago. His area of specialization is Ottoman economic and social history.

Since 1947, Prof. İnalcık has published 28 books and over 350 articles. His book "The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600" was published in England in 1977 and has been translated into seven languages. He is a co-editor of volume five of the UNESCO "History of Humanity," and one of the editors of the series "The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage," published by Brill in Leiden, Netherlands.

Prof. İnalcık is a member of numerous scholarly societies and organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Historical Society (corresponding member) and the Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi (honorary member). He served as head of the International Association of Southeast European Studies between 1971 and 1974 and has headed the International Association of the Economic and Social History of Turkey from its inception in 1977 to the present. He has been a member of the Türk Tarih Kurumu since 1947.

Another of his innumerable contributions to the present and future study of Ottoman history came in 1993, when Prof. İnalcık donated his valuable collection of books, journals and offprints to the Bilkent University Library. Known as the Halil İnalcık Collection, it contains works on the history of the Ottoman Empire in many languages (including Ottoman and modern Turkish, Persian, Arabic, English, French and German) and is housed in a special room at the library.