Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Thomas Magedanz

© Fraunhofer FOKUS/ Matthias Heyde

Prof. Magedanz is an outstanding computer sciences and telecommunications expert placing a strong emphasis on applied research in order to link academia and industry within an emerging global networking and services market.

Since more than 20 years Prof. Magedanz is performing pioneering research and globally recognized education courses for master, diploma and PhD students in the field of converging fixed and mobile telecommunications, the internet and information technologies. In this context he has initiated and managed numereous national and international R&D projects centered around Next Generation Service Delivery platforms on top of both legacy and next generation networks based on worldwide recognized technology testbeds.

He received his Diploma and his Ph.D. in computer sciences from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in 1988 and 1993, respectively. In 2000 he finished his “Habilitation” for Applied Computer Sciences at Technical University of Berlin. In 1989 he joined as the first research associate the Department for Open Communication Systems (OKS) of the Technical University Berlin and helped to set up the chair. After his PhD he became assistant professor and continued his education and research activities with a strong focus on distributed computing and telecommunications.
Besides his employment as university lecturer and researcher he has been involved in several international strategic studies and research projects related to Intelligent Networks, Telecommunications Management Systems, Personal/Mobile Communications, TINA/Next Generation IN, and Mobile Agents / mobile Middleware within Deutsche Telekom AG, EURESCOM and the European RACE / ACTS / IST research programmes. From 1996 - 1998 he chaired the "Intelligent Communication Environments" research department at the GMD Research Center (now being part of Fraunhofer) for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS), where he was responsible for several projects related to the evolution of service delivery platforms in face of most recent IT, namely IN, TINA, CORBA, J2EE, Intelligent/Mobile Agents. In those days he has lead the development of the globally recognized Grasshopper Mobile Agent Platform. From 1998 –2002 he worked as R&D coordinator for the IKV++ Technologies AG, a spin-off company of GMD FOKUS, which provided consultancy services and developed advanced telecommunication middleware and service products.

In 2002 Thomas Magedanz has been called as full university professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences faculty at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, leading the new chair for next generation networks (called Architektur der Vermittlungsknoten - AV in German), sponsored by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, where he is concentrating on the education of master and PhD students, performing special lectures and project courses in the field of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based service delivery platforms for converged media and commucications services on top of next generation networks and the future internet.

In addition, he acts as managing director of the “next generation network infrastructure” competence center of the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, which also provides various testbeds and tools in the context of Next Generation Networks and Open Converged Service Delivery Environments. The most popular ones include the Open IMS Playground established in 2004 and the Open Source IMS Core System published in 2005.

In 2007 he opened the new Open SOA Telco Playground for IMS/Web2.0/SOA service prototyping on top of NGNs and legacy circuit switched telecom networks.

In spring 2010, he opened the Future Seamless Communication Playground based on the new FOKUS Open Evolved Packet Core software toolkit (www.OpenEPC.net) in order to enable applied research on IP core network evolution and seamless mobility support in multi access wireless network environments. In 2011, he entered with his team also into the machine 2 machine (M2M) communications domain by developing the Open Machine Type Communications software toolkit (www.open-MTC.org).
 
In addition to all this, Prof. Magedanz has lead the German GLab DEEP Project and joined in 2007 the European FIRE (Future Internet Research Experimental Facilities) Expert Group, in which he is actively promoting the federation of NGN and future internet research testbeds. In this context he was and still is very active in several FIRE projects, such as Openlabs, BonFIRE, and Fed4FIRE. In addition, he and his team are very active within the more Industry targeted FI Private Public Partnership (PPP) Program, in which the developed OpenXXX toolkits are used as enabling technologies within the FI PPP flagship projects FIWARE, XIFI, and FISTAR. In all of these above mentioned initiatives Prof. Magedanz is actively prototyping the evolution of Next Generation Networks towards the Future Internet and establishing a Smart City enabling platform based on the aforementioned toolkits.
All this has lead in 2013 to the establishment of the new Smart Communications Playground, which enables the rapid and seamless creation and provision of Smart City Applications, enabled by a set of generic human to human and machine to machine communication APIs and SDKs making strong use of emerging HTML5, WebRTC and cloud-based service delivery platforms.
 
In this NGN evolution context Prof. Magedanz and his team is working closely with major international network operators around the globe (including Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Telefonica, PT Innovacao, Orange, BT, NTT, Saudi Telecom Company, Telkom Indonesia, Telkom South Africa, Entel S.A., etc) as well as equipment manufacturers (such as Qualcomm, Intel, NSN, Ericsson, Samsung, Huawei, etc.) which make use of the aforementioned toolkits and testbeds to prototype innovative applications and test interoperability and network migration scenarios.

Since 2005 Prof. Magedanz is organizing the famous IMS Workshop series, which has been renamed in 2010 into FUSECO Forum, bringing together every year 200-300 international experts from more than 30 nations (www.fuseco-forum.org). Since 2009 he is organizing the international IEEE Workshop Series on Open NGN and IMS Testbeds - ONIT (www.onit-ws.org).
 
Prof. Magedanz aims also for global academic networking. In this context, Prof. Magedanz is acting since 2006 as Extraordinary Professor for Next Generation Networks and Services at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Cape Town, South Africa (www.ee.uct.ac.za). From 2007 – 2009, he was also Visiting Professor to the Department of Mathematics, Physics and Computing at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland (www.wit.ie). Since October 2012 he is also acting as Visiting Professor at the Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica (DIE) at the Universidad de Chile (www.die.uchile.cl). In 2012, he started a DAAD project Unified Future Internet Testbeds (www.daad-unifi.org), which is aiming to harminze education and research infrastructures (i.e. testbeds) and corresponding lectures across TU Berlin and four partner universities in the southern hemisphere, namely Universidad de Chile, University of Cape Town, Hanoi University for Technology, and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.