2/20/2013 Jenny Applequist, CSL and ITI
Written by Jenny Applequist, CSL and ITI
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Klara Nahrstedt a Fellow in recognition of her contributions to quality-of-service management for distributed multimedia systems.
Nahrstedt, who has been on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Illinois since 1995, has long been a leading researcher in multimedia systems, having made multiple seminal contributions in quality of service (QoS) management for distributed multimedia systems. She is a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Information Trust Institute.
Her early work on QoS brokerage with QoS translation, negotiation, and adaptation services set between application and transport layers to enable end-to-end QoS contracts, published as “QoS Broker” in 1995, changed the way multimedia end-system architectures are designed and built.
Later, she extended that work with a novel adaptation that modeled the end-to-end QoS problem based on a control-theoretical approach-- which was the first use of control theory in multimedia systems. She was also the first to address the issue of QoS-based routing in ad hoc networks.
The Fellow designation also honors Nahrstedt’s contributions in the area of multimedia wireless networks. Her novel pricing scheme for ad hoc networks found wide acceptance, and her results on cross-layer QoS approaches, including bandwidth and delay management, have been deployed in Boeing software and Motorola products.
She has also made important contributions in the area of multimedia scheduling for mobile devices. Her fundamental work on energy-efficient, dynamic, soft-real-time CPU scheduling for mobile multimedia devices, and her development of “GRACE-OS,” the first energy-efficient OS for mobile multimedia devices, have been widely recognized; much of that work is reflected in Microsoft’s mobile OS software.
Perhaps most notably, Nahrstedt is widely recognized as the world leader of the 3D teleimmersive systems and networking field. She developed the first multi-view 3D video adaptation framework for bandwidth management, and the first view-casting protocols for multi-view 3D video. She also created new metrics for 3D immersive video and the first comprehensive framework based on sound theoretical underpinnings.
“Receiving the ACM Fellow status is a great honor for me personally,” says Nahrstedt. “In addition, this award recognizes the joint work I have done with my students and colleagues in ITI. I will continue to pursue research on QoS management of distributed multimedia systems in three societal domains--trustworthy cyber-physical infrastructures for the smart grid, collaborative immersive spaces in tele-healthcare, and robust cyber-physical systems in the airline-airplane maintenance ecosystem.”
Nahrstedt has received numerous prior honors, including the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the University Scholar Award, the Humboldt Research Award, and the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, among others.
According to its website, ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. Every year it honors as Fellows a select group of distinguished researchers who “personify the highest achievements in computing research and development from the world’s leading universities, corporations, and research labs, with innovations that are driving economic growth in the digital environment.” ACM will formally recognize the 2012 Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet in June 2013.