Donat, Markus G.

Research Professor at
Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

My research aims to understand and predict how different types of climate extremes, such as heatwaves, intense precipitation or storms, are changing in the context of climate variability and long-term climate change related to global warming. This involves studying weather and climate processes that cause or amplify such extreme events, and how they respond to different climate drivers. My work involves the development and analysis of high-quality observational datasets of climate extremes, and different types of climate model simulations aiming to predict climate in the near-term (e.g. next years and decade) and more distant future. A key focus is to reduce the uncertainty related to climate variability in these climate predictions. I also explore the efficacy of land-based approaches to mitigate climate change by removing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and how these mitigation approaches may be put at risk through exposure to extreme weather and climate events.

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Research interests

<p>My research focus&nbsp;lies within the area of Distributed Systems, Edge Computing, and Internet Technologies. In particular, I have been working at the intersection of distributed systems, software engineering, and IoT systems.&nbsp;Motivated by concrete problems I witnessed during my years as an entrepreneur (between 1998-2005), I decided to fully dedicate my time on the underlying conceptual and scientific issues in the areas above and became full professor in 2005. Since then, I <strong>successfully supervised 42 PhD students</strong> in my research group.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>

<p>I focus on&nbsp;<strong>resilient large-scale distributed software systems</strong>. The fundamental concerns I work on include: (1) compositional software services spanning the whole Compute Continuum including: IoT sensors, Edge devices, Fog server, and Cloud data centers; (2) data, as it flows within that infrastructure; (3) coordination, context, and control; and (4) security and privacy. My goal is to develop a set of coherent scientifically grounded methodologies and open-source software tools for addressing the engineering of large-scale distributed software-intensive (IoT) systems by focusing on these outlined areas. By providing the necessary scientific foundations, I develop engineering support—buttressed with novel and groundbreaking scientific approaches—to address challenges from a more advantageous ecosystems vantage view. Overall, I pursue a&nbsp;<em>paradigm shift</em>, where one conceptual worldview is replaced by another. This new worldview comprises a shift toward building&nbsp;<em>inherently</em>&nbsp;<em>resilient</em>, software-intensive IoT ecosystems rather than continuing to engineer the “patched” distributed IoT/Edge/Fog/Cloud&nbsp;systems of today.&nbsp;In particular, I focus on&nbsp;integrating&nbsp;edge computing and AI, which gives birth to edge intelligence (EI).&nbsp;&nbsp;In this area I focus on&nbsp;AI for edge (intelligence-enabled edge computing) and AI on edge (artificial intelligence on edge), where I co-authored the book <em>Edge Intelligence – From Theory to Practice</em>, Springer 2023.</p>

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