As of September 1, 2020, Florian Echtler has joined the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University as Associate Professor in the Human-Centered Computing group.
Florian Ecthler holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Technical University of Munich, from where he also received his PhD in 2009.
He has experience from both Siemens Corporate Research and the University of Regensburg. For the past six years, Florian Echtler has held a position as Junior Professor in Computer Science and Media at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Describe your area and research interests:
- Almost our entire computing infrastructure today is controlled by a few US companies (the ”Big Five” – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple). This does provide some convenience but at the cost of mostly giving up control over our data. Advertisers, intelligence services, and plain old criminals are very interested in, and very often also succeed at, getting access to our data.
At the same time, we have quite powerful computers in our pockets – our smartphones, which also contain the technology to communicate directly between devices, without routing data through some unaccountable cloud service or cell provider. My research is, therefore focused on enabling localized, peer-to-peer communication methods for everyday mobile interaction, to reduce our reliance on external services and gain back control over our data.
Which current projects are you going to work on?
- Within the “big picture”, one aspect I’d like to focus on is how to enable mobile phones to directly join the newly established LoRaWAN networks that have a very low transfer speed, but a far larger range than either WiFi or cellular networks. This could enable a new type of peer-to-peer messaging that will work without any central infrastructure (base stations, network cables, cell towers, etc.).
Why did you choose to continue your career at Aalborg University?
- Getting offered a tenured position is not something that happens all the time, so I was very happy about this opportunity, and my family always wanted to live near the sea, so it was an easy decision to move to Aalborg.
Any fun facts your new colleagues should know?
- I’m a hacker! Not the bad-guy-with-hoodie from any recent movie, but the original sort of hacker who likes to take things apart, see how they work, repurpose them, and build new stuff from them. For more information, read this article about the history. of hacking