Research Interests

In my research I am focusing on the field of large-scale distributed computer systems, especially hybrid peer-to-peer systems, for the provision of global-scale virtual online environments. This research work has led to the awareness that such global-scale complex computer networks with high dynamics as well as high demands in terms of latency, resilience and consistency are hard to handle with traditional deterministic distributed systems approaches. These approaches often just consider the behavior of each single network entity instead of taking the collective behavior of the entire system into account. Many examples have shown the vulnerability of large computer network to phenomena emerging on a system level by the collective behavior of all system entities. This is likely to become even worse in the future with rising network size, complexity and dynamics, as for example in global-scale virtual online environments. For this reason I am studying the applicability of principles and approaches from complex systems science in this field. By regarding large computer systems as complex networks it is possible to study emergent behavior and phenomena on the system level. A deep knowledge about non-linear dynamics and emergence in complex computer networks allows the application of self-organized and decentralized algorithms for the efficient and resilient handling of large-scale computer networks. Most recently I also got interested in socio-aware networked computer systems. The increasing prevalence of social network services in the internet yields the demand of novel network infrastructures which consider the high dynamics in complex social networks. By this means, technical and social systems exert mutual influence and the field of socio-aware technical network systems establishes a new interdisciplinary field of research incorporating computer science, complex network science as well as social sciences.