Özalp Babaoğlu (born August 10, 1955, in Ankara, Turkey), is a Turkish computer scientist. He is currently professor of computer science at the University of Bologna, Italy. He 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.

Research Areas

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

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 through 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. With Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Babaoğlu implemented virtual memory in BSD Unix on 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.