Gerhard Maierbacher




Email: gerhard@maierbacher.de

I recently finished my PhD at the University of Porto, Faculty of Sciences, Portugal. At the moment I am setting the path for the future... Updates soon!

About me

Born 1976, I grew up in a small village near Munich, Germany, where I learned to walk, to talk, and almost everything else until I started my professional life and some time later my academic education.

My professional life, initially more practical oriented, started with my apprenticeship as Electronic Technician and continued with several interesting jobs at Rohde & Schwarz where I got ---beside many practical skills--- the curiosity to look at problems in an analytical fashion, approaching them in a conceptual way.

Upon graduation from the Berufsoberschule München (a school type which does not exist in most countries) I obtained the qualification for university entrance and subsequently started studying at the Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany. This eventually lead to a Diploma (equivalent to a MSc degree) at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology where my Diploma thesis was supervided by Prof. J. Hagenauer and Prof. J. Barros at the Institute for Communications Engineering.
During my studies I worked at Rohde & Schwarz, at the esz-Kalibrierlabor, at the Fraunhofer Institute (ESK) and at Cosiro; and did internships at the Fraunhofer Institute (ESK) as well as at the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, where I also gained some first international work experience.

While working on my Diploma thesis at TUM I was confronted my first research questions; it soon became clear to me that I wanted to continue doing research for some time ---that I wanted to embark on this "philosophical" quest for knowledge. Upon graduation I therefore chose to do a PhD together with my former supervisor Prof. J. Barros at the University of Porto, Faculty of Sciences, Portugal. My research focused on source coding solutions for sensor networks particularly in scenarios where a large number of sensors causes feasibility and scalability issues. Eventually this lead to my PhD thesis entitled "Coding Strategies for Sensor Networks: Clustering, Compression and Network Coding" and several publications in international journals and conferences.
During my PhD I got the opportunity to push my research and open up my mind while spending some time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, USA, and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Laboratory for Algorithmic Research in Network Information, Switzerland.

At the moment I am setting the path for the future... Updates soon!

Research Interests

Fundamental communication aspects in wireless sensor and ad-hoc networks with special focus on:

Currently

July 4th, 2012:
Seems they found something... exciting times:)
January 2012:
Backpacking in South America
August 2011:
Moving back to Germany
July 2011:
PhD defense, done:)
April 2011:
Thesis written and delivered
March 2011:
Wrapping-up my work on distributed source coding

Publications

Journal Articles

G. Maierbacher and J. Barros. Source-Optimized Clustering and Distributed Quantization for Large-Scale Sensor Networks. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, Vol. 5, Iss. 3, May 2009.

Conference Papers

S. B. Cruz, G. Maierbacher and J. Barros, Joint Source-Network Coding for Large-Scale Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2011), Saint Petersburg, Russia, August 2011.

J. Almeida, G. Maierbacher and J. Barros, Low-complexity index assignments for secure quantization. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS 2009), Baltimore MD, USA, March 2009.

G. Maierbacher, J. Barros and M.Medard. Practical Source-Network Decoding. In Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems 2009 (ISWCS 2009), Siena, Italy, September 2009.

G. Maierbacher, J. Barros, Diophantine Index Assignments for Distributed Source Coding. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW 2007) - Frontiers in Coding, Lake Tahoe, California, USA, September 2007.

G. Maierbacher, J. Barros, Code Design for the Distributed Scalar Quantization Problem based on Diophantine Analysis. In Proceedings of the IEEE Winter School on Coding and Information Theory (WSIT 2007), La Colle sur Loup, France, March 2007.

G. Maierbacher and J. Barros. Source-Optimized Clustering for Distributed Source Coding. In Proceedings of the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM 2006), San Francisco, CA, USA, November 2006.

G. Maierbacher, J. Barros, The Kullback-Leibler Distance and the Mean Square Distortion of Mismatched Distributed Quantizers. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Mathematical Techniques and Problems in Telecommunications, Leiria, Portugal, September, September 2006.

G. Maierbacher, J. Barros. Low-Complexity Coding for the CEO Problem with many Encoders. In Proceedings of the Twenty-sixt Syposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, Brussels, Belgium, May 2005.

Submitted Articles/ Work in Progress

G. Maierbacher and J. Barros, Diophantine Distributed Source Coding. Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, July 2011.

G. Maierbacher, S. B. Cruz, J. Barros, Practical Source-Network Coding. To be Submitted to the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2012.

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PhD Thesis

I defended my PhD thesis entitled "Coding Strategies for Sensor Networks: Clustering, Compression and Network Coding" on July 12, 2011. The examining committee consisted of the following members:

        President Prof. António Beça Gonçalves Porto at the University of Porto, Faculty of Sciences, Portugal
        External Examiner Prof. Christina Fragouli at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Laboratory for Algorithmic Research in Network Information, Switzerland
        External Examiner Prof. Paulo J. S. G. Ferreira at the University of Aveiro, Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Informática, Portugal
        Internal Examiner Prof. Luís Lopes at the University of Porto, Department of Computer Science, Portugal
        PhD Advisor Prof. João Barros at the University of Porto, Faculty of Engineering, Portugal

and I was awarded a PhD in Computer Science (having been Approved with Distinction) by the University of Porto, Faculty of Sciences, Portugal. At this point thanks go to the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) for founding my research under grant SFRH/BD/29918/2006.

Supervised Students

While doing my PhD I got the opportunity to supervise MSc students within the scope of their thesis. My first student, João Paulo Patriarca de Almeida, worked on the thesis entitled "Adaptive Cryptography for Advanced Coding" which he successfully defended University of Porto, Department of Computer Science, Portugal in July 2009. Part of the work done within the scope of this thesis was presented at the 43rd Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS 2009), Baltimore MD, USA, March 2009.
Furthermore, I was able to win Susana Pereira Bulas Cruz for the thesis proposal entitled "Decoder Design and Decoding Models for Joint Source Network Coding". The thesis was successfully defended at the University of Porto, Faculty of Engineering, Portugal in July 2010. Part of the work was later presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2011), Saint Petersburg, Russia, August 2011.

Projects

Within the scope of my doctoral project I was involved (to a different extent) in the following projects:

        SIGaPaNo Sensor Information Gathering with Patrol Nodes
        N-CRAVE Network Coding for Robust Architectures in Volatile Environments
        WITS Wireless Information-Theoretic Security
        CALLAS CALculi and LAnguages for Sensor networks

Service/Other Professional Activities