Özalp Babaoğlu

Özalp Babaoğlu (born August 10, 1955, in Ankara, Turkey), is a Turkish/American computer scientist. He is currently "Professore Alma Mater" at the University of Bologna, Italy where he was a Full Professor of computer science from 1988 to 2025. He is also President of the ELICSIR Foundation.

Babaoğlu received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the UNIX system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoğlu was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He has participated in several European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems. Babaoğlu is an ACM Fellow and has served as a resident fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna and on the editorial boards for ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed Computing.

Babaoğlu is an avid cyclist and has a son and daughter.

BSD Unix During his PhD work at UC Berkeley, Babaoğlu was one of the architects of “BSD Unix” which was a major factor in the rapid growth of the Internet with its built-in TCP/IP stack and has influenced numerous other modern operating systems including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, SunOS, Mac OS/X and iOS. His virtual memory system, implemented with Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, became a core part of the kernel of Unix/32V, the first 32-bit version of Unix, written for the DEC VAX minicomputer, a hardware lacking page reference bits. The Berkeley version of UNIX became the standard in education and research, garnering development support from DARPA, and was notable for introducing virtual memory and inter-networking using TCP/IP. BSD Unix was widely distributed in source form so that others could learn from it and improve it; this style of software distribution has led to the open source movement, of which BSD Unix is now recognized to be one of the earliest examples.

Research Areas Babaoğlu is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in a wide range of research topics, including:

Operating Systems Performance Evaluation and Modeling Distributed Computing Byzantine Agreement Parallel Computing on Networks of Workstations Group Communication Systems Peer-to-Peer Systems. Babaoğlu has contributed to peer-to-peer computing through paradigms, algorithms, frameworks (Anthill ) and a widely used open source simulation software package (PeerSim) Autonomic Computing and Self-Management Gossip-Based Aggregation Overlay Networks and Topology Management Decentralized Shape Formation Biology and Nature-Inspired Computing. As part of work on the EU-funded BISON Project, Babaoğlu and colleagues have developed a library of “design patterns” for distributed computing that draw inspiration from biological or natural processes. Game-Theoretic Techniques in Peer-to-Peer Systems Cloud Computing High-Performance Computing