Biography

Osman Balci is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Mobile/Cloud Software Engineering Lab at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) in 1975 and 1977, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Syracuse University (New York) in 1978 and 1981. Dr. Balci has served as Founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM SIGSIM Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Knowledge Repository and editorial board member of several journals. He served as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of two international journals: Annals of Software Engineering, 1993-2002 and World Wide Web, 1996-2000. He served as Chair of ACM SIGSIM, 2008-2010; and Director at Large of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS), 2002-2006. Dr. Balci received the 2018 W.S. 'Pete' White Innovation in Engineering Education Award at Virginia Tech, the 2015 ACM SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award, and the 2013 McLeod Founder's Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession given by SCS. Most of Dr. Balci's work has been funded by the U.S. Navy since 1983. From 1998 to 2004, he provided technical services for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency programs in the areas of M&S acceptability assessment and system independent verification and validation (IV&V). He has also provided technical services for architecting naval surface warfare systems. His current areas of expertise center on Mobile Software Engineering on the Apple platform, Cloud Software Engineering on the Java platform, architecting cloud software-based system of systems, software/system IV&V, Modeling and Simulation (methodology, verification, validation, and certification), and Digital Game-Based Learning (digital educational game development methodology, digital educational game quality evaluation). His e‑mail and web addresses are balci@vt.edu and https://manta.cs.vt.edu/balci.