On Tuesday, 21 January 2025, the newly appointed Professor of Computer Science Dr Lin Wang gave his inaugural lecture together with Prof. Dr Erdal Kayacan from Electrical Engineering in lecture hall O2.
The dean of the faculty, Prof Dr Jürgen Klüners, welcomed both professors and the audience at the beginning of the event. The first lecture was then given by Prof Dr Erdal Kayacan, who has represented the subject area of Control and Automation Engineering at the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology since April 2024.
Professor Dr Lin Wang, who joined the team at the Institute of Computer Science in November 2023, then explained in his lecture on "Efficient and Sustainable Networked Systems for Connected Intelligence" that innovations in the field of computer networks have focused on cloud and edge networks in recent years. In particular, advances in the underlying network infrastructures are needed to fully utilise the great potential of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. According to Professor Wang, networked systems play a crucial role here - from large data centres to the tiny Internet of Things (IoT). In the field of data centres, he discusses research topics from recent years such as in-network computing and serverless computing to support large-scale AI training and inference. In the edge field, he introduces the concept of battery-free IoT devices that autonomously harvest the energy for their operation from their environment to support edge AI inference. Finally, he explained his vision and novel concepts to address the two critical challenges of networked systems, namely efficiency and sustainability, and outlined the path to realising networked intelligence.
Professor Lin Wang received his doctorate in the subject area of computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015. Before joining Paderborn University, he had been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam since December 2018. From 2016 to 2018, he worked first as a Senior Researcher and then as an Athene Young Investigator at TU Darmstadt. Before that, he spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at SnT Luxembourg. During his PhD studies, he attended the IMDEA Networks Institute from 2012-2014. He has received several major awards, including a Google Research Scholar Award, an Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE RTSS 2022, and three other Best Paper Awards. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
