Dr. Ulrich Norbisrath

Ulrich Norbisrath is a senior research fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He has been working in Estonia since the end of 2006. He is involved in research projects from the areas of Cloud Computing, Distributed Computing, and Knowledge Management. He invented the concept of Friend-to-Friend (F2F) Computing (http://f2f.ulno.net) which allows ad-hoc establishment of scientific or service based networks. F2F Computing is currently adapted to various mobile platforms and equipped with hardened security. He has developed methods and tools supporting migrating legacy desktop and server environments to the cloud and calculating respective costs. For two years now he is active in the area of analyzing the search behavior of today's internet users.

He is especially focusing on complex search tasks not being fulfilled by a simple look-up but needing to explore several sources and demanding manual aggregation of information. For this purpose he and his group developed the Search-Logger (http://www.search-logger.com) project. Search-Logger monitors entire search sessions related to specific information needs. The Search-Logger project is currently extended with the ability to publish a personal search strategy for a specific search task enabling new ways of social search. His vision is to use graph storage and visualization techniques to enable explorative search as one solution to the ever growing information overload problem.

Ulrich Norbisrath teaches courses on agile software development, graph transformation, systems administration, and mobile computing. He likes supervising students and has successfully supervised 22 master, 8 German Diploma, and 8 bachelor students. He currently employs in his group four PhD students supporting his research.

He is the organizer of the Fujabadays 2011 and member in several reviewing committees. In his PhD (2006) at the RWTH Aachen University (Aachen, Germany) he researched a way to enable the easy deployment of smart home services in random physical environments. He used a contract and graph transformation based approach to simplify the domain specific software composition and configuration process in the smart home domain.