Nahrstedt to be inducted in German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina

10/10/2013 By Jenny Applequist and Kim Gudeman, Coordinated Science Lab

Klara Nahrstedt will be inducted in the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Written by By Jenny Applequist and Kim Gudeman, Coordinated Science Lab

CS Professor Klara Nahrstedt will be inducted in the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Germany’s foremost academic society, in March 2014. Nahrstedt’s selection to Leopoldina’s membership is in recognition of her scientific achievements and impact on science.

Klara Nahrstedt
Klara Nahrstedt
Klara Nahrstedt

“It’s incredible to be recognized,” said Nahrstedt, the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor of Computer Science and acting director of the Coordinated Science Lab. “It was unexpected and I’m honored to receive this award.”

Nahrstedt has long been a leading researcher in multimedia systems, having made multiple seminal contributions in quality of service (QoS) management for distributed multimedia systems.

Her early work on QoS brokerage with QoS translation, negotiation, and adaptation services set between application and transport layers that enabled end-to-end QoS contracts, published as “QoS Broker” in 1995, changed the way multimedia end-system architectures are designed and built.

She later extended that work with a novel adaptation scheme that modeled the end-to-end QoS problem based on a control-theoretical approach-- which was the first use of control theory in multimedia systems. She was also the first to address the issue of QoS-based routing in ad hoc networks.

She has also made important contributions in the area of multimedia scheduling for mobile devices. Her fundamental work on energy-efficient, dynamic, soft-real-time CPU scheduling for mobile multimedia devices, and her contributions to the development of “GRACE-OS,” one of the early energy-efficient OS for mobile multimedia devices, have been widely recognized.

Nahrstedt is also widely recognized as a seminal world leader in the 3D teleimmersive systems and networking field. Her research group developed the first multi-view 3D video adaptation framework for bandwidth management, and the first view-casting protocols for multi-view 3D video. Her group also created new metrics for 3D immersive video and the first comprehensive framework for multi-modal session management in teleimmersive environments based on sound theoretical underpinnings.

Nahrstedt received her bachelor’s in mathematics and master’s degree in numerical analysis from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. She was a research scientist in the Institute for Informatik in Berlin until 1990. After receiving her PhD from the Department of Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania in 1995, she joined CS @ ILLINOIS. She is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. She has enjoyed strong working relationships with German colleagues throughout her career, and in 2009 she was honored with the prestigious Humboldt Research Award, allowing her to deepen ties with German colleagues.

Founded in 1652, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina is one of the oldest academies of science in the world. With some 1,500 members, the Leopoldina brings together outstanding scientists from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries. The Leopoldina was appointed as the German National Academy of Sciences in 2008. In this capacity, it represents the German scientific community in international committees and speaks out on social and political questions.


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This story was published October 10, 2013.