Dr. Georg Wittenburg

Georg Wittenburg is co-founder and CEO of Inspirient, a Berlin-based startup specializing in cognitive analytics. Before founding Inspirient, he was a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group in BCG's Berlin office and at BCG's Strategy Institute in New York. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Inria's HIPERCOM team from November 2010 until October 2011, and as a research assistant at the Computer Systems & Telematics Group at Freie Universität Berlin from January 2007 until March 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Freie Universität Berlin in 2010, and his M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the same university in 2005 and 2003 respectively.

Short CV

09/2015 - present	Inspirient (Berlin, Germany) Co-founder / CEO
01/2012 - 08/2015	The Boston Consulting Group (Berlin, Germany) Management consultant and from 04/2013 to 05/2014 researcher at the BCG Strategy Institute (New York, USA)
04/2010 - 10/2011	Inria / École Polytechnique (Paris, France) Visiting / postdoctoral researcher at the High Performance Communications (HIPERCOM) team, Laboratoire d'Informatique
01/2006 - 03/2010	Freie Universität Berlin (Berlin, Germany) Ph.D. student and research assistant at the Computer Systems & Telematics Group, Institute of Computer Science
03/2008 - 05/2008	Microsoft Research Cambridge (Cambridge, United Kingdom) Research intern at the Systems & Networking Group
02/2007 - 04/2007	University of Waikato (Hamilton, New Zealand) Visiting researcher at the WAND Network Research Group
05/2004 - 12/2005	Freie Universität Berlin (Berlin, Germany) Graduate student of computer science (major) and business administration (minor)
09/2003 - 04/2004	University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) Graduate student of computer science (major) and commerce (minor)
10/2000 - 08/2003	Freie Universität Berlin (Berlin, Germany) Undergraduate student of computer science (major) and business administration (minor)

Academic Activities

Georg's research is focused on wireless ad hoc networking. He is particularly interested in the topics of distributed service provisioning, event detection in wireless sensor networks, and accuracy of wireless network simulations.

Research Projects

SPi - Service Placement in Ad Hoc Networks
Taking an application-centric view on ad hoc networks, cooperation between devices is structured by application-level clients and servers, i.e., certain nodes requesting services provided by other nodes. This gives rise to the question in how far the performance of the network can be increased by intelligently selecting which nodes are to host a particular service. The process of identifying the appropriate nodes to act as servers is referred to as service placement and invesigated using our SPi service placement framework. More information is available on the SPi homepage.
Distributed Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks
The AVS-Extrem (formerly Fence Monitoring) project is a use case for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) focused on collaborative, in-network data processing. The goal is to develop a distributed event detection algorithm that can reliably report security relevant incidents (e.g. a person climbing over a fence) to a base station. The vision is that through cooperation of many sensor nodes the accuracy of event detection can be greatly improved, while at the same time saving energy by reducing multi-hop communication with the base station. More information about the AVS-Extrem project is available on the AVS-Extrem homepage.
ScatterWeb on ns-2 – Simulating ScatterWeb sensor nodes using the network simulator ns-2.
FACTS – A rule-based middleware framework for wireless sensor networks.

Selected Publications

Georg Wittenburg, Norman Dziengel, Stephan Adler, Zakaria Kasmi, Marco Ziegert, and Jochen Schiller. Cooperative Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks. In IEEE Communications Magazine, 50(12):124-131, December 2012. (bib)
Georg Wittenburg and Jochen Schiller. Service Placement in Ad Hoc Networks. Springer, London, UK, January 2012. (bib, web page)
Georg Wittenburg, Norman Dziengel, and Christian Wartenburger. Method and Sensor Network for Attribute Selection for an Event Recognition. German patent DE 10 2009 006 560 B4 (WO 2010/086325 A1, US 20120036242 A1), June 2011. (bib, available online)
Georg Wittenburg. Method for Providing Data on Mobile Terminals and Mobile Terminal for Performing the Method. German patent DE 10 2009 017 315 B3 (WO 2010/119128 A1, EP 2 419 867 A0, US 20120042165 A1), October 2010. (bib, available online)
Georg Kunz, Olaf Landsiedel, and Georg Wittenburg. From Simulations to Deployments. In Klaus Wehrle, Mesut Günes, and James Gross, editors, Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation, chapter 6, pages 83-98. Springer, August 2010. (bib)
Georg Wittenburg, Norman Dziengel, Christian Wartenburger, and Jochen Schiller. A System for Distributed Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '10), pages 94-104, Stockholm, Sweden, April 2010. (bib, slides)

[complete list]

Theses

Georg Wittenburg. Service Placement in Ad Hoc Networks. PhD thesis, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, October 2010. (bib, slides, available online)
Georg Wittenburg. A Rule-Based Middleware Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks. Master's thesis, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, November 2005. (bib, slides)
Georg Wittenburg. A Defense Against Replay Attacks on Chaumian Mixes. Bachelor thesis, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, August 2003. (bib)

Talks

Georg Wittenburg and Jochen Schiller. Service Placement in Ad Hoc Networks. Kick-off Meeting GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch "Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms & Service Overlay Networks", Berlin, Germany, November 2009. (slides)
Georg Wittenburg. Software Integration in Simulation. GI Research Seminar "Modeling Techniques for Computer Networks Simulation", Dagstuhl, Germany, April 2008. (slides)
Georg Wittenburg. State of the Art in Wireless Sensor Networks. Seminar at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, March 2007.

Professional Activities

TPC member of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin '13), Berlin, Germany, September 2013.
TPC member of the 10th International Conference on Wireless Information Networks and Systems (WINSYS '13), Reykjavík, Iceland, July 2013.
TPC member of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin '12), Berlin, Germany, September 2012.
Co-chair of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Pervasive Group Communication (PerGroup '11), Houston, TX, USA, December 2011.
TPC member of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin '11), Berlin, Germany, September 2011.
TPC member of the 4th International Workshop on OMNeT++, Barcelona, Spain, March 2011.
Co-chair of the 1st IEEE Workshop on Pervasive Group Communication (PerGroup '10), Miami, FL, USA, December 2010.
TPC member of the 3rd International Workshop on OMNeT++, Malaga, Spain, March 2010.
Local arrangements chair of Droidcon '09, Berlin, Germany, November 2009.
TPC member of the 2nd International Workshop on OMNeT++, Rome, Italy, March 2009.
Shadow TPC member of ACM CoNEXT '08, Madrid, Spain, December 2008.
Co-chair of the 7th GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch "Drahtlose Sensornetze", Berlin, Germany, September 2008. (proceedings, bib)
Reviewer for Computer Communications, Mobilware '09, Sensors, ISCC '10, Wireless Networks, JCM, ICCP '11, MILCOM '11, Computer Networks, and IJCS.