Dustdar, Schahram
ICREA Research Professor
Engineering Sciences
Short biography
Research interests
My research focus 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. 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 successfully supervised 42 PhD students in my research group.
I focus on resilient large-scale distributed software systems. 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 paradigm shift, where one conceptual worldview is replaced by another. This new worldview comprises a shift toward building inherently resilient, software-intensive IoT ecosystems rather than continuing to engineer the “patched” distributed IoT/Edge/Fog/Cloud systems of today. In particular, I focus on integrating edge computing and AI, which gives birth to edge intelligence (EI). In this area I focus on AI for edge (intelligence-enabled edge computing) and AI on edge (artificial intelligence on edge), where I co-authored the book Edge Intelligence – From Theory to Practice, Springer 2023.