Klaus Wehrle Awarded ERC Consolidator Grant

Computer Scientist Klaus Wehrle will receive 2 million Euros for a project on reliable networked systems.

 

RWTH professor Klaus Wehrle, head of the Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems, will receive a Consolidator Grant from the EU. The grant is targeted at excellent researchers who received their doctorate seven to twelve years ago. Wehrle’s will now receive funding of two million Euros for his participation in the research project SYMBIOSIS.

The interlinkage of humans, machines and everyday processes via the Internet has become part of today’s information society. Smartphones and apps open up new possibilities of coordination and collaboration, and they have a strong impact on our everyday lives. These possibilities will be further expanded and enhanced through developments such as could computing, cyber-physical systems (CPS), and the internet of things (IoT). Concomitantly, the number, mutual interdependence, complexity, and degree of interlinkage of networked systems will increase by several orders of magnitude. Deficiencies in software or design may result in systems failures, incompatibilities, and security threats, which in turn lead to inordinate costs.

Reliable Systems

As part of the SYMBIOSIS project, Wehrle and his team seek to secure the reliability and interoperability of networked systems. To this purpose, SYMBIOSIS investigates the concept of symbolic program analysis for networked systems. The innovative process used in the project subsumes distributed and temporally indeterminate execution paths under categories of equivalent behavior, which reduces the vast number of possible execution paths and facilitates a comprehensive analysis.

Professor Klaus Wehrle Professor Klaus Wehrle studied at Karlsruhe University, today the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he also obtained his doctorate. After research in Berkeley (as a postdoc) and Tübingen (in the DFG Emmy Noether program), he was appointed professor at RWTH Aachen and, in 2010, became head of the Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems. Wehrle is a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering, acatech, and Spokesperson for the Division of Communications and Distributed Systems of the German Informatics Society (GI) and for the Information Technology Society of VDE (ITG).