This talk will lay out a long-term vision for the future of human collaboration, communication, and interactions. It will discuss approaches to solving the key technical challenges as we move towards realizing this vision - to provide people with enhanced awareness of their world, to help them better sense and interpret their digital and physical environments, to enable the long-distance exchange of people's emotions and perceptions, and to augment and improve the human experience in a digitally connected world. The talk will take a software- and systems-focused perspective, discussing how analytic-based approaches to infrastructure automation help tame the ever-increasing network complexity, how a world-wide platform for real-time analytics helps making sense of the billions of data streams from IoT devices, how clever infrastructure techniques provide novel mixed-reality experiences, and how software might - or might not - be created by artificial intelligence.
Markus Hofmann joined Bell Labs - Nokia's research organization that is globally recognized for inventions that shaped the technology world - in 1998, where he transitioned from individual researcher, to department head, and research executive. His work has focused on multimedia communications, cloud, Internet, content networking, IoT, AI systems, and more. He is commonly known for his pioneering work on reliable multicasting over the Internet and for defining and shaping fundamental principles of content networking. In his current role, Markus is building up Nokia Bell Labs' software and platforms research program, leading a global team of about 100 researchers in inventing and creating disruptive technologies in the software platforms space - from project inception all the way through business transfer. Markus has published over 60 journal and conference papers and has given many talks and graduate courses all over the world. Markus has a Ph.D. with honors in Computer Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. For more information, please check out http://www.mhof.com.