“My focus is on teasing information out of networks”
© 2021 EPFL
EPFL Professor Matthias Grossglauser has been awarded the grade of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, a notable recognition given to less than 0.1% of voting members annually.
As co-director of the Information and Network Dynamics Lab (INDY) in the School of Computer and Communication Science (IC), Matthias Grossglauser’s research focuses on machine learning and data analytics in the context of network science, computational social science, and recommender systems..
Recognizing his contributions to the modeling and analysis of network traffic and data, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has elevated Grossglauser to a Fellow, an honor awarded annually to only a very small number of the Institute’s voting members.
The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity, with 400,000 plus members in 160 countries. It is an authority on sectors including aerospace systems, biomedical engineering and telecommunications, publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 1300 active industry standards.
“It is an honor to be elevated to the IEEE Fellow grade, recognizing a set of specific technical accomplishments in the Institute’s fields of interest, and it gives me an opportunity to thank my scientific collaborators over the years,” said Grossglauser.
Reflecting on his research and practical contributions, Grossglauser mentions his recent work on the problem of network alignment, where one finds correspondences between the nodes of two (or more) networks via their structure only. This has important applications, for example, in computational biology and in network privacy.
The IEEE also recognized his previous work on network traffic measurement based on trajectory sampling. Beyond the academic visibility, this research led to the formation of an Internet Engineering Task Force – the premier internet standards body - Working Group, and was ultimately standardized and incorporated into the products of router vendors and network management software.
Grossglauser says his research into the transport capacity of mobile wireless networks has a more theoretical flavor, “it demonstrated the counter-intuitive notion that mobility in a network can help, rather than hurt. This fundamental observation has inspired a lot of follow-up work, such as routing protocols and sensor networks that exploit mobility, rather than mitigate it.”