“Stochastic networks are a tremendous source of mathematical challenges, and provide powerful paradigms for understanding and designing complex large-scale systems at the heart of society and technology.”

Sem Borst has been a (part-time) Full Professor in Stochastic Operations Research in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) since 1998.  His main research interests are in the area of performance evaluation and resource allocation algorithms for large-scale stochastic networks.

A major theme in Sem’s research is to explore how local behavior and interactions affect the dynamics of large-scale stochastic networks on a macroscopic level.  This provides crucial insight for the design of low-complexity resource allocation algorithms, which operate in a distributed fashion, and yet achieve near-optimal performance on a global network scale.

Sem Borst received his MSc degree in applied mathematics from the University of Twente in 1990, and his PhD degree from Tilburg University in 1994.  In 1994, he was a visiting scholar at the Statistical Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England.  In 1995, Sem joined the Mathematics of Networks and Systems research department of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, USA.  In addition to his position at TU/e, he maintains a (part-time) affiliation with Bell Labs.

Sem has published over 190 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings, and his H-index is 39.  He serves or has served on the editorial boards of several journals, such as ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Mathematical Methods of Operations Research and Queueing Systems, and served as program committee member of various conferences. 

• LNMB (Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research)
• STAR (Stochastics – Theoretical and Applied Research)
• IFIP WG 7.3 on Computer Performance Modeling and Analysis

Partners in (semi-)industry

• Nokia
• Philips
• TNO