Pervasive Computing – Wonderful Future or Fabulous Illusion?



Thursday, 16. October 2003 | 11:30 Uhr

Speaker

Friedemann Mattern

Organisation

ETH Zurich

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Reporting

Old fairy tales are about flying carpets and magic mirrors, but today we use airplanes and TV sets instead. Will smart everyday objects and other promises of pervasive computing soon be realized and thus loose their magic and enchantment? Are today’s technological forecasts really better than the blunders of former futurists?

Friedemann Mattern

Friedemann Mattern was born on July 28, 1955 in Freiburg, Germany. He studied computer science at the University of Bonn and became a Faculty Research Assistant at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Kaiserslautern in 1983. There he worked at the “Collaborative Research Center for VLSI Design and Parallelism”. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1989 with a thesis on distributed algorithms.

 

From 1991-1994 he was Professor of practical computer science at Saarland University, Saarbrucken, and from 1994-1999 Professor of practical computer science and distributed systems at Darmstadt University of Technology. There he was chair of the graduate program “Enabling Technologies for Electronic Commerce”. Friedemann Mattern has been full Professor of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich since July 1999.

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