Prof. Jon Crowcroft

"Opportunity is the Mother of Invention - how Delay Tolerant Networking necessitated Data Centric Networking..."

(Vortrag im Rahmen der "Distinguished Lecture Series" des "Max Planck Instituts für Software-Systeme")

In this talk, I'm going to tell the story of how a group of european researchers arrived at a design for communications software that seems rather well suited to the new "Data Center Networking" paradigm. The tale starts with moving from UCL Cambridge and choosing to learn about ad hoc networks, and then with Intel research lablet trying out a few disruptive ideas and stumbled on the notion for Haggle ("Haggle" comes from the phrase Ad Hoc Google, now really known as Opportunistic Networking) combining results from Grossglauser & Tse's work on capacity of multi-hop networks with Kevin Fall's work on Delay Tolerant Networks. In the process of building various testbeds in the Haggle project (and three complete versions for native Java phones, C# on Windows Mobile, and native Android&iPhone versions), as well as measuring various aspects of human society, we ended up with a system that appears to be rather more general than expected. Most recently, for example, it was used to build a P2P secure, disconnect tolerant version of Dropbox, as well as to track a Flu epidemic.

Bio: Jon Crowcroft
Jon Crowcroft has been the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory since October 2001. He has worked in the area of Internet support for multimedia communications for over 30 years. Three main topics of interest have been scalable multicast routing, practical approaches to traffic management, and the design of deployable end-to-end protocols. Current active research areas are Opportunistic Communications, Social Networks, and techniques and algorithms to scale infrastructure-free mobile systems. He leans towards a "build and learn" paradigm for research.

He graduated in Physics from Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1979, gained an MSc in Computing in 1981 and PhD in 1993, both from UCL. He is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the IET and the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE.

He likes teaching, and has published a few books based on learning materials.