Information and Communication Management
Our daily life, the way we work, play, travel, trade and interact with each other, critically depends on reliably working software that manages possibly complex information, often communicating across networks with other software systems in order to serve our needs. The amount of data to be managed, the pervasive availability of communication infrastructures and the complexity of the resulting software systems have become key challenges for entire industries.
For instance, the software run by the New York stock exchange must respond within fractions of a second to each of tenths of thousands of users every day, with just seconds downtime per year. How can such high responsiveness and extreme availability be achieved? How is it possible to update and query large amounts of data in real time? How can fast and reliable communication be ensured? How must such systems be architected in order to be maintainable without disrupting service availability? How can they grow to adapt to ever changing user needs and new technologies without ending in complete chaos? How can data integrity and communication security be ensured? How can we trust that such systems are not vulnerable? How can we assess their quality?
These are some of the questions researched by the groups bearing the ICM track of the Computer Science Master’s programme. The ingenious combination of modern information and communication systems technology in the framework of most advanced software engineering practices is the key for building lage-scale, data and communication intensive systems. The joint teaching of these topics in the Information and Communication Management Track enables our students to be the architects of tomorrow’s success stories in computer science.
Research Groups
Strong research groups conduct outstanding fundamental and applied research projects:
- Communication Systems (Prof. Peter Martini)
- IT Security (Prof. Michael Meier)
- Usable Security And Privacy (Prof. Matthew Smith)
- Sensor Data and Information Fusion (Priv.-Doz. Wolfgang Koch)