After my studies in computer science, which I finished late 1995, I joined the System Software research group of Prof. Nehmer at the University of Kaiserslautern as a research assistant and scientific staff member. It was this time that shaped my research interests in Operating Systems and Distributed Systems, as well as Software Engineering and Software Architecture.

From 1995 to 2003, the University of Kaiserslautern was hosting the temporal research institute ("Sonderforschungsbereich") SFB 501, one of the largest software engineering research projects in Germany. As a member of this research project, I was working in the area of Generic System Software (subproject B5), investigating new software technologies for creating custom-built embedded operating systems. Beyond that, I was decisively responsible for the preparation of research proposals and contracts for two funding periods, as well as for shaping the research direction of the subproject in general. The concepts of generic software components and the application of the Design Space technique to configure and customize such components are some of the results of this work. Find some further details here:

• the concept of Generic Components
• system development with Generic Components
• the Design Space technique
• using Design Spaces for component-based development
• Ph.D. thesis on "A generative approach to customized run-time platforms"

My work on Design Spaces - a technique being well suited for semi-formally capturing favorable configuration scenarios - already pointed into the direction my research interests should take me from there on. After finishing my Ph.D. thesis and moving on from academia to industry (to see the "other side" of the technology world :-), I focused on system management and configuration management, working on ways to extend currently existing management tools to act more intelligently and independently from human administrators. This work started in the area of software and configuration management (using Novadigm's product suite Radia, which is now part of the HP OpenView suite), and is currently crowned with my work on HP's strategic effort for "Managing the Adaptive Enterprise".