Ender Ayanoglu Brief Biography

Ender Ayanoglu received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA in 1986 in electrical engineering. He was with the Communications Systems Research Laboratory, Holmdel, NJ, part of AT&T Bell Laboratories until 1996, and Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1996 until 1999. During 1999-2002, he was a Systems Architect at Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA. Since 2002, he has been a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, where he served as the Director of the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing and held the Conexant-Broadcom Endowed Chair during 2002-2010.

His past accomplishments include invention of the 56K modems, characterization of wavelength conversion gain in Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) systems, and diversity coding. 56K modems broke what was believed to be the "Shannon limit" of about 36 kb/s for voiceband modems. Since every laptop computer includes one, the number of implementations of 56K modems is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions or even billions. His work on wavelength conversion gain in WDM networks showed large gains can be achieved via better wavelength selection and routing algorithms without the need for optical wavelength converters. And, diversity coding is a technique for link failure recovery in communication networks employing erasure coding introduced in 1990, prior to the publication of the first papers on network coding. During 2000-2001, Dr. Ayanoglu served as the founding chair of the IEEE-ISTO Broadband Wireless Internet Forum (BWIF), an industry standards organization which developed and built a broadband wireless system employing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and a Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithm that provides Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. This system is the precursor of today's Fourth Generation (4G) and Fifth Generation (5G) cellular wireless systems.

From 1990 to 2002, Dr. Ayanoglu served on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Committee, and from 1999 to 2001, was its Chair. From 1993 until 2014 he was an Editor, and since January 2014 is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2004 to 2008. From January 2015 to December 2016, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Series on Green Communications and Networking. He led the efforts to convert this series into an IEEE journal, and from June 2016 until August 2020, he served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the new journal IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking.

Dr. Ayanoglu is the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in 1995 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 1997. He has been an IEEE Fellow since 1998 with citation for contributions to communication theory and coding applications in communication networks. He received the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Technical Committee Outstanding Service Award in 2014. He received the IEEE Communications Society Joseph LoCicero Award for Exemplary Service to Publications in November 2023 with citation for outstanding contributions to IEEE Communications Society journals as Editor, Editor-in-Chief (EiC), and Founding EiC. He is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer from January 2022 until January 2024. This award has been renewed for the period from January 2024 until January 2026.