SAT – Bio-IT

Besides to classical research area of bioinformatics, the turn to nature for solutions to technological questions has brought us many unforeseen great concepts. This encouraging course seems to hold on for many aspects in technology. Biological systems are able to handle challenging technical issues with an elegance and efficiency still far beyond current human artifacts. As a fundamental research challenge, we envision the design of highly scalable, robust, and efficient coordination and control techniques for heavily networked decentralized computing systems interacting with the physical world in multiple ways, and at multiple scales, from the global Internet down to micro and nano devices. Many of these devices are highly mobile and autonomous, and must adapt to the surrounding environment in a totally unsupervised way.

Falko Dressler - Committee Chair

Computer Networks and Communication Systems
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

Falko Dressler is an assistant professor leading the Autonomic Networking Group at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He teaches on self-organizing sensor and actor networks, network security, and communication systems. Dr. Dressler received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree from the Dept. of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen in 1998 and 2003, respectively. From 1998 to 2003 he worked at the Regional Computing Center at the University of Erlangen as a research assistant. In 2003, he joined the Computer Networks and Internet group at the Wilhelm-Schickard-Institute for Computer Science, University of Tuebingen. Since 2004, he is with the Computer Networks and Communication Systems group at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Dr. Dressler is an Editor for the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks (WINET) journal and Editor for the Journal of Autonomic and Trusted Computing (JoATC). He is General Chair for the 2nd International Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems (Bionetics 2007). He was co-chair and TPC member of several international conferences and workshops (ACM, IEEE, IFIP, GI). He co-authored more than 70 reviewed research papers. Dr. Dressler is a member of ACM, IEEE, IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Computer Society, and GI (Gesellschaft fur Informatik). He is actively participating in several working groups of the IETF. His research activities are focused on (but not limited to) Autonomic Networking addressing issues in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Self-Organization, Bio-inspired Mechanisms, Network Security, Network Monitoring and Measurements, and Robotics.