Professor for Telecommunication Systems, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (BTH), Sweden
Kurt is a professor for telecommunication systems at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH). He is leading the team on SDS (Secure and Distributed Systems) at BTH’s Department of Computer Science(DIDA). Prior to BTH, Kurt was holding from 2008 to 2013 the Chair of Future Communication at the University of Vienna (endowed by A1 Telekom Austria). From February 2008 to August 2008, he worked at the Network Virtualization Lab of the National Institute for Information and Communication Technology (NICT) in Tokyo, Japan. Between 1999 to 2008, Kurt was an assistant professor at the Department of Distributed Systems of the University of Würzburg, Germany where he was heading the departments group on “New Network Architectures, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Systems and Self-Organization”. Kurt has received this Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1999 and this Habilitation degree in 2008; both were awarded by the University of Würzburg, Germany. Kurt’s research interests are gathered around the topics of the architectures and the operation of future distributed systems, softwarized networks, and Cloud systems (incl. NFV and SDN-based networks). Kurt has specialized within these areas on orchestration, control, and service management mechanisms (incl. service marketplaces, Blockchain algorithms) and their performance. Lately, Kurt has turned to the issues of security, confidentiality, digital sovereignty, and data privacy in service chains and in edge- and Cloud-based systems. Kurt is leading multiple funded academic and industry collaborations in this area. Kurt and his team contributed to various Future Internet and network virtualization testbed projects, incl. GENI (US), Akari (Japan), or G-Lab (Germany). Kurt has also collaborated with the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der informationstechnik), was a member of the steering committee of the European Future Internet Assembly and has actively contributing to the ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). He is currently for BTH member of ETSI’s ISG on the Security of AI (SAI). Kurt serves since 2017 as the General Chair of the IEEE Conference on NFV-SDN. He has advised more than 50 MSc thesis and is currently supervising three Phd students.
