T-Labs’ research team gains three professors

Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-Labs), Deutsche Telekom’s central research and development institute affiliated to TU Berlin, has added three more professors to its staff. Dr. Axel Küpper has been hired as a full professor, and Dr. Tansu Alpcan and Dr. Alexander Raake have been appointed as junior professors. Organizationally, all three professorships are sited within TU Berlin’s School IV, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

Professor Dr. Axel Küpper (40) assumes responsibility for Service-centric Networking at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and will head TU Berlin’s department for the same field. His aim is to study and develop new methods, technologies and platforms for provision, operation and networking of future services, both within a global, ubiquitous Internet and in other communications networks (such as ad-hoc networks). Axel Küpper’s work will focus on developing new application scenarios for services-centric networking and on enhancing various services concepts, such as cloud computing and location-based services. In addition, it will concentrate on integrating and evaluating relevant service platforms and their functions in line with need, with the aim of gaining new findings about their practical applications. “In our research, we will consider both user-centric and network-centric services concepts, and we will compare the two approaches,” Dr. Küpper explains.

Axel Küpper studied computer science and economics at RWTH Aachen University, where he also earned his doctorate in 2001. In 2006, he completed his postdoctoral qualification (habilitation) on the topic of “Location-based Services” at LMU Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität). He conducted research and taught at that university until his appointment to TU Berlin.

Professor Dr. Tansu Alpcan (34) has been appointed to a post in the area of Autonomous Security at TU Berlin and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories. He develops mathematical models for enhancing protection of IT networks against attacks. “Many decisions in this area are still being made intuitively, apart from any basis of verifiable knowledge,” explains Tansu Alpcan. His work will concentrate on optimizing and formalizing not only companies’ decision processes in terms of network security, but also those processes that IT systems will increasingly be making automatically.

Tansu Alpcan studied electrical engineering at Bogazici University in Istanbul and then undertook doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). The author of over 70 scientific articles, he has been awarded numerous prizes in the area of computer science. Since 1998, he has been a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world Association for electrical engineering and computer science.

The research work of Professor Dr. Alexander Raake (38) at TU Berlin and Deutsche Telekom Laboratories will focus on technical quality aspects of voice, audio and video transmission in modern telecommunications systems, including such applications as Internet telephony and Internet TV. His work will be aimed at developing user-friendly multimedia services that fulfill users’ quality expectations. Such development is possible only by means of basic research of the sort carried out by Prof. Raake in his area, evaluation of IP-based applications. “My research is aimed at developing methods for measuring the quality of multimedia transmissions from the user’s perspective,” notes Raake. “In the process, we consider users’ own perceptions, quality assessment and resulting acceptance of services.”

Alexander Raake studied electrical engineering at RWTH Aachen and ENST Télécom, Paris. After earning his doctorate at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, he worked at LIMSI-CNRS in Orsay (France). For the past ten years, his work has been contributing to international standardization within the framework of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T). The honors he has accumulated during his career include the Literature Prize of the Information Technology Society (ITG) of the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE).


About Deutsche Telekom AG

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with over 150 million mobile customers, around 39 million fixed-network lines and approximately 17 million broadband lines (as of September 30, 2009). Its product brands are T-Home (fixed-network telephony, broadband Internet), T-Mobile (mobile communications), and T-Systems (ICT solutions). As an international Group with approximately 260,000 employees operating in around 50 countries worldwide (as of September 30, 2009), Deutsche Telekom generated more than half of its revenue – EUR 61.6 billion – outside of Germany in 2008.