The Department 4

Professors

• Prof. Dr. Peter Martini
• Prof. Dr. Pedro José Marrón
• Prof. Dr. Christoph Strelen (em)

Sekretariat

Directions

• On the way to us

CS 4 in a nutshell

We are surrounded by networks: The Internet, home networks, in-car networks, high-speed networks, sensor networks and others. These networks allow computers, human beings, mobile devices and other "things" to communicate - i.e. to exchange data - and to coordinate their activities.

The result is an exciting world of virtualization and cooperation where physical proximity becomes less and less important: All around the world, people interact and play online games with people they have never met in real life. Services like file storage, computation, banking and shopping are provided from almost anywhere. On the other hand, the network of services and opportunities comes along with a network of attackers and threats: Millions of PCs have become parts of botnets, zombie computers controlled remotely. Attackers hiding tens of thousands kilometers away, enjoy round trip times to and from their unsuspecting victims of just a few hundred milliseconds.

An additional mega-trend is the proliferation of small computing devices equipped with communication capabilities; cooperating objects organizing themselves into networks to achieve a common task. Self-organization of wirelessly networked embedded systems ("the invisible computers") is at the heart of this vision of pervasive and ubiquitous computing.

At the Institute of Computer Science 4, the closely cooperating groups headed by Pedro José Marrón and Peter Martini address a wide range of hot topics in the exciting realm sketched here. With long-term cooperation contracts linking our department to the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS and to the FGAN Institute FKIE, we reach out to application-oriented research institutes in our region. Numerous joint research activities with these institutes and project-based cooperative research with key industry players such as Siemens, Nokia, T-Com and T-Mobile, allow both our staff and our students, to work on next generation prototype systems. In addition, we are active in basic research efforts funded by the DFG (the German Research Foundation), by the EU and others.

Our strong engagement in teaching activities at the B-IT, the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology, reflects our understanding of globalization: Attract the best students from all over the world, teach them the basics of our research activities, allow them to join our project work for some months or some years and see them leave as friends and cooperation partners in their home countries or anywhere else in the world.