In short

I am an independent researcher and honorary professor of software-based innovation at the Technical University of Berlin. Previously, I was Director General for Research for Technological Sovereignty and Innovation at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS), Professor for Quality Engineering of Open Distributed Systems (QDS) at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB), and Director of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society - The German Internet Institute. I am a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and an honorary member of the German Testing Board (GTB). I have been a member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), the Science Platform on Sustainability 2030 (WPN2030), the board of directors of the Technologiestiftung Berlin (TSB) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and chairwoman of the supervisory board of the Helmholtz Centre for Information Security (CISPA). I have received awards for my scientific work such as the German Prize for Software Quality (DPSQ), the Eureka Innovation Award and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Prize for Young Professors.

Publications

Please read about my (co-)authored publications » sorted by years and types.

Supervision

Please read about supervised and/or reviewed PhD Theses » sorted by years and types.

Presentations

Please find here some of my presentations » also sorted by years and types. In later years only, I collected some of them.

My major steps in applied research.

Although I spent my professional life basically in Berlin, I had the joy to work internationally as well as on different topics and with very different partners from research, industry, NGOs and government. Below, I share with you some of my motivations and thoughts.

 As an independent researcher, I am back to the roots of research and have an appreciation for in-depth exploration of specific research questions. .
As General Director at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research I aimed at improving technological souvereinty and innovation by appropriate and practical research instruments and initiatives in e.g. AI, microelectronics, 6G or quantum computing to name only a few .
I continued to ask how networking and software technologies contribute to the digital transformation in society, industry and living and how the contributions could be improved. We launched the Weizenbaum-Institute for research on the the Networked Society together with Prof. Martin Emmer and Prof. Axel Metzger and many others.
We live in times of fundamental change: The need to transform economy and society for achieving the sustainability development goals meets the digital transformation changing the range of options for future civilizational development. How could both fit together in our common digital future has been worked out by the German Advisory Council on Global Change
When being asked to lead Fraunhofer FOKUS, the Research Institute on Open Communication Systems together with Prof. Manfred Hauswirth, I was looking at new initiatives such as the Berlin Center for Digital Transformation or the FOKUS-Akademie in order fostering the cooperation with industry and society.
I cannot resist doing research on testing and started to look into security testing. Not only the use of model-based testing methods for security testing is challenging, but also how to elaborate the unknowns about potential vulnerabilities by randomized tests such as fuzz tests. Both need to be guided by a security-oriented risk analysis.
A central element to any smart city or smart region is the efficient, secure and trustworthy provisioning and analysis of urban data as well as the use of implied information for the improvement of urban environments or of the processes used to monitor, control and steer them. A particularily important approach is that of open (urban) data.
While testing is my passion, there are also other new and interesting fields in ICT research. In particular when we started to think about how ICT can improve the public space, soon the research area on ICT for smart cities developed.
I was fortunate being awarded by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung and used the support and pace to extend my research on testing into automated test designs and model-based testing. I initiated the UML Testing Profile and developed with others its first version and tool support for it.
Addressing the increasing demands for powerful test execution automation, the development of the new Testing and Test Control Notation TTCN-3 was launched at ETSI. For that, I spent quite some time in converting our testing experiences into concepts for TTCN-3 and in discussions with my colleagues in Sophia-Antipolis, France; Budapest, Hungary; Gö:ttingen, Germany; and all over.
Returning to FOKUS, I continued to improve the service quality of communication protocols and networks. This time however by automated testing. We created a team that developed test suites, testing tools and a test lab for broadband communication and Internet technologies. We started extending TTCN by adding e.g. performance testing concepts.
At a 3-months-research stay at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California I touched upon voice communication and IT security and collected first experiences in industrial R&D projects. I did not publish results, which was certainly a mistake.
In my PhD, I worked on performance-oriented specification of communication protocols and the verification of deterministic bounds of their Quality-of-Service characteristics by use of process algebraic specifications and developed the LotoTis approach for timed temporal ordering specifications.
After my Diploma thesis in 1990 under the supervision of Prof. Joachim Fischer on a simulation data base for the analysis of communication protocols specified in SDL, I became a PhD student by joining the post-graduate course on open communication systems at TU Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Radu Popescu-Zeleting and Prof. Adam Wolisz.