Post-Doctoral Researcher | Lecturer (Part-Time)

Chair of Distributed and Networked Systems @ Ruhr University of Bochum

Since April 2023

Since joining the Distributed and Networked Systems group in April 2023 at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), I have supervised several bachelor theses, supporting students in their research and development of innovative solutions. Additionally, I held a teaching assignment for the subject “Distributed Systems” in English during the summer semester of 2023.

The lecture Distributed Systems covers basic architectures and methods that allow for functional and productive distributed computer systems. Such a distributed system employs multiple independent subsystems to fulfill a certain task while appearing to the user as a coherent single system. To achieve this goal, the different subsystems need to have common knowledge.

Distributed systems present multiple challenges that will be addressed in this lecture: subsystems need to be discoverable, they must exchange messages, replicated data needs to be kept in a consistent state across subsystems, faults in individual subsystems need to be tolerated, and the resources of the entire distributed system should be used efficiently so that the given task is fulfilled effectively. These components and aspects can be found in modern, Internet-based systems, which guarantee the functionality of services like the World Wide Web, email, or file sharing.

However, increasing digitization also affects other domains, such as logistics and robotics. To cope with the growing complexity, distributed systems—and especially their architectures—become increasingly important. Therefore, exclusive examples from applied robotics research will be shown in the lecture, referencing the topics discussed here.

Literature

• Maarten van Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Distributed Systems – Principles and Paradigms, Pearson [PDF@Author]