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2007 ORION Leadership Award Winner
Dr. Nicolas D. Georganas
Technological change is now such a constant factor in our lives, we are rarely, if ever, surprised by the new marvels that regularly come our way, and we probably never even think about the people who, over the last four decades, have been making it all happen.
One such person is Dr. Nicolas Georganas, one of Canada’s most accomplished information technology and networking research pioneers and world authority on interactive multimedia communications.
The winner of the 2007 ORION Leadership Award, Dr. Georganas, Associate Vice-President of Research (External) at the University of Ottawa, has made substantial and enduring technical contributions in computer, cellular and multimedia networking.
Widely regarded as one of the “fathers” of high technology in Canada, he helped train and mentor the community researchers that has made Ontario a global leader in information technology.
As a working researcher, he is currently involved in at least six highly relevant projects. His many honours include the Order of Ontario and the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal. He was recently invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Born in Greece in 1943, he received his undergraduate electrical engineering degree in Athens, then earned two doctorates, one in Germany, the other at the University of Ottawa, which has been his home ever since.
In the early 1970s, he was one of the first Canadians to make major contributions to the foundations of information networks. Initially, this involved work on the optimal design and the flow and congestion control of such networks. The result was several well-published algorithms, which are still pertinent and useful in today's high-speed networks and are often cited in the literature.
Dr. Georganas turned his attention to local area networks (LANs). One of his endeavours in this field resulted in a breakthrough algorithm for the exact numerical analysis of queuing networks.
It was that field's premier discovery of the decade, and his book on the subject was published by MIT Press in 1989. Subsequently, Dr. Georganas' work on the modeling of "fractal" data traffic and its implications in designing switches for high-speed networks earned him the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer's (IEEE's) coveted Prize Paper Award in 1995.
He also did substantial work on wireless traffic and was among the early major global contributors to the optimal dynamic and hybrid channel allocation assignment in wireless mobile cellular networks.
He founded a multimedia lab at the University of Ottawa, the first of its kind in Canada, with a radically diverse team of engineers, psychologists, economists and people from other disciplines.
To date, Dr. Georganas has received $55 million in research grants and contracts. The money has been used to fund both his own and many other people's research and help build institutions that bring together government, academia and private industry.
Dr. Georganas was instrumental in establishing the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation's research programs, and was principal investigator at the National Capital Institute of Telecommunications (NCIT) from 2003-2005, which he helped to create.
While at NCIT, Dr. Georganas worked in a field called collaborative virtual environments and co-founded the DISCOVER laboratory, (Distributed and Collaborative Virtual Environments Research Laboratory).
Dr. Georganas can point to a long list of awards, citations and achievements, including recognition as a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences (Royal Society of Canada). He’s also received the Pioneer in Computing in Canada Award from the IBM Centre of Advanced Studies and earlier this year, he received the very first Canada Computer Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
For more information, visit www.discover.uottawa.ca.
Back to the 2007 ORION Award winners page
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