Thomas Fuhrmann
From Self-Organizing Systems Group
Thomas Fuhrmann is an independent research group leader at the Faculty of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. In 2003-2006 he was research group leader at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. His key interest is in self-organizing systems, especially in computer networks and distributed computing systems.
Thomas graduated from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1996 with a thesis on the World-line formalism in Quantum Field Theory. During his studies Thomas also spent one year at the University of Cambridge, GB, where he earned the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics better known as the Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. 1997-99 Thomas wrote his PhD-thesis on the use of Computer Simulations in Physics Education which slowly moved him over from Physics to Computer Science. Consequently, during the last year of his doctorate Thomas changed from the physics department at the University of Heidelberg to the computer-science department of the University of Mannheim, Germany. In Mannheim, Thomas studied IP multicast, mostly multicast with unidirectional links and receiver feedback from very large groups.
Caught by the e-commerce wave Thomas could not resist accepting an offer from The Boston Consulting Group. 2000-01 he spent 18 month on six projects, mostly concerned with strategies for the media industry and utilities in the Internet age. But finally, the desire for research and teaching overwhelmed the pleasures of the nomadic life of a consultant and made Thomas rejoin the University, this time in Karlsruhe. From 2001-2003 he was post-doctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Zitterbart. In 2003 the German Research Foundation awarded him an Emmy Noether grant to start his own group.
Since then he has lead several research projects on self-organizing systems. Together with his group he has developed new peer-to-peer systems in the Internet, for example, the distributed file system Igor-FS. He has also designed a new routing algorithm, scalable source routing, which is particularly suitable for large ad-hoc networks. Driven by his interest for micro-controllers and embedded systems, Thomas developed a small distributed Java virtual machine that can serve as basis for ambient computing systems. Using the power of self-organization Thomas’ systems have become an interesting alternative to address the current scalability problems in high performance computing.
Thomas is especially interested in the emergent behaviour of self-organizing distributed systems. He studies their properties with both mathematical analysis and computer simulations. Besides this theoretical work, he always tries to create real-world applications that make actual use of the theoretical results. If he can afford the time, he likes to code his algorithms himself and watch them in action.
