emergenCITY is pleased to announce two new Principal Investigators in its team. Oliver Hohlfeld took over as head of the Department of Distributed Systems at the University of Kassel in 2022 already, succeeding Kurt Geihs, who retired. Hohlfeld is now also taking over Geihs’ activities within emergenCITY. In addition, [Thorsten Papenbrock] from the Big Data Analytics research group at the Philipps University of Marburg is joining the emergenCITY team. emergenCITY is thrilled about these two renowned experts from the field of computer science for its team.

Oliver Hohlfeld

After holding research positions at TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen University, the computer scientist Oliver Hohlfeld joined the Institute of Computer Science at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg as a professor from 2019 to 2022. At the University of Kassel, he now heads the Department of Distributed Systems at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is a member of the Scientific Centre for Information Technology Design (ITeG). Hohlfeld is an expert in Internet architecture and empirical Internet security. He empirically analyses Internet systems in order to promote an optimal technology design beyond assumption-based design approaches.

“The internet is the most complex system created by humans - the central nervous system of our digital society. Increasing the resilience of the Internet will be my main focus at emergenCITY”, says Oliver Hohlfeld.

Thorsten Papenbrock

Thorsten Papenbrock completed a degree in IT systems engineering and completed his PhD in computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute. There, he also headed the “Distributed Computing” research group until 2021. Since 2022, Papenbrock has been a qualifying professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Philipps University of Marburg, where he is a member of the Big Data Analytics research group. His interest focus on data engineering problems related to data profiling, data cleansing and data integration as well as distributed data challenges such as robustness, efficiency and elasticity. He is also interested in open-source technologies and environmentally friendly applications.

“In emergenCITY, we want to contribute to the development of efficient and sustainable software systems that support people in building crisis-proof structures in cities and enable a more precise understanding of modern, digital cities. Our area of expertise is scalable methods for data management and data analyses,” says Papenbrock, describing his research group’s field of work at emergenCITY.

Welcome to the team!