Phuoc Tran-Gia, Professor of Communication Networks at the University of Wuerzburg, chairs the German research initiative on next generation networks.
Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with more than 12 Million Euro (307 Billion Dong, 16.8 Mio USD), Tran-Gia’s project German-Lab (G-Lab, http://www.german-lab.de) is split into two stages: The first one started in Dagstuhl in October 2008, and the kick-off of the second one will be in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the end of February 2010. 33 partners from industry, academia, and research institutes participate in this challenging scheme, targeting a contribution to the Future Internet. True to his motto “Think clean slate (Make your mind free from any boundaries), act evolutionarily”, Tran-Gia conducts experimental-driven research (a combination of theoretical research and field testing) with his project partners.
When observing today’s internet, the necessity of a project like G-Lab is striking. Innovative applications such as video streaming or online gaming have high demands for the network which is, however, built on mechanisms and algorithms from the 1970ies and 80ies. “For example, would you get on a train without knowing the time of arrival, its route, and not even whether the train will ever reach its destination?” This statement from Prof. Phuoc Tran-Gia underlines the importance of such Future Internet research initiatives. In order to create a high speed train with detailed information on the arrival time, its route and the guarantee of an arrival, the G-Lab consortium is looking for new network architectures and protocols. As such a major task cannot be solved within one single national venture, the G-Lab project partners work close together with other Future Internet research initiatives, e.g. US GENI (http://www.geni.net), and OneLab 2 (Europe) (http://www.onelab.eu), which is part of the European FIRE initiative (http://www.future-internet.eu).
Besides leading the G-Lab project, Tran-Gia advices the European Commission in the FIRE initiative. Furthermore, he presents his view on the Future Internet in several keynote talks and tries to convince other countries like Vietnam to set up a similar scheme. You might get the chance to listen to one of his informative keynotes at TridentCom in Berlin (http://www.tridentcom.org), or at ATNAC in Auckland, New Zealand (http://ciri.org.nz/sense/atnac2010/call.html) this year.
Phuoc Tran-Gia was born and grew up in Da Nang, Viet-Nam. He is an alumni of the Phan Thanh Gian High-school in Da Nang. After graduating in Electrical Engineering at the University of Stuttgart, he worked industry-wide at IBM, SEL/ITT (now Alcatel-Lucent). In 1982 he earned his doctorate (Dr.-Ing.) at the University of Siegen. Since 1988 he holds the chair of Distributed Systems at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Wuerzburg.
