Johan Lukkien – Welcome to my home page

email: j.j.lukkien@tue.nl

snail mail:                                           visiting address at Computer Science:
Johan J. Lukkien                                               Main Building HG 5.07
Department of Mathematics and            tel.       +31 40 247 5147 (direct)
Computer Science                                            +31 40 247 8309 (secretary)
Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513
5600 MB EINDHOVEN
The Netherlands

(update: October 2009)

General

I am professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE), in the capacity group Computer Science. This group is divided into so-called expertise areas; I chair the expertise group System Architecture and Networking since 2002.

I am with TUE since 1991. From July 2000 until December 2001 I worked at EESI, the Eindhoven Embedded Systems Institute as research leader "home networks".

I am married to Marike and we have four children, three boys: Klaas Jan, Christoph and Jelmer and a girl: Elke.

Research

My current research area concerns distributed systems, more precisely, Resource Contrained Networked Embedded Systems. The focus of my work is on coordination and resource management. With coordination I mean the building of applications from distributed services, or directing a set of devices towards a common goal. In order to realize such a common goal with predictable performance properties, resource management is needed in this distributed setting, at least in the systems I consider. This leads to architectural and rather technical questions concerning distribution, concurrency, control flow and scheduling.

 

Generally I value a close connection between research and application, for example, through the development of prototype systems and through projects with industry. Our line of research can be followed by examining these projects (Note: date is October 2009).

 

Earlier projects include the IST project FABRIC and the STW project: QoS for in-home digital networks where we built a distributed video streaming system in a resource constrained environment and studied the research questions derived from that. We developed a fully adaptive system that responds to changes in its environment. Research result included new coding means for adaptive video, decision procedures based on learning algorithms and modeling techniques for processing pipelines.

 

In a series of ITEA projects (Robocop, Space4U, Trust4all) on a component-based platform for resource-constrained devices. Results were transferred to the MPEG working group on Multimedia Middleware. Insight was obtained how to manage software components in a similar way as tangible objects. Among this insight is the concept of third party coordination, meaning a clear separation between coordination logic and application.

 

More recent work includes

  1. ISHARE (BSIK, Freeband) – here we worked on service coordination, but on more powerful devices like CE devices, computers and handhelds. We introduced the notion of communities to perform sharing and access control. We used our AMOSA framework for this.
  2. CANTATA (ITEA) – our point of attention herein is multi-resource scheduling in the context of video processing; the case we consider is a surveillance system. In this project we have started to work on predictable platforms with contributions to the RTAI real-time extensions of Linux and on uCOS. This work extends in the recently started ViCoMo project in which we examine a more distributed context and resource prediction.

 

Until last year our application domain was taken mainly from the multimedia and surveillance domain. We are shifting this to automotive, medical and light application domains, while we continue to study the same concepts and applying the experience of the previous work. In the medical and light domains we put the emphasis on intelligent and reactive environments through embedded sensing. Current projects are

 

  1. WASP (IST, FP6) – our work concerns a programming model for sensor networks based on coordination of distributed services. Our goal with this work is to allow full control of large networks of embedded sensors (up to a 100), including reprogramming, such that still very low energies can be achieved.
  2. Sofia (ARTEMIS) – we focus on developing a smart space that is integrated with the IP infrastructure such that advanced inference engines can be used. Applications are within the area of lighting. We cooperate closely with NXP research and Industrial Design.
  3. Vitruvius (IOP Gencom) – here we regard a personal area network as a mobile cluster connecting to the infrastructure for several purposes: retrieving sensor information and uploading code to program the sensors. We study implications in the area of security and trust in the context of a medical application. We cooperate with Electrical Engineering (group SPS) and Kempenhaeghe.
  4. iLighting the World (TU/e, stimulering) and ENSURE (KWR) – In these projects we cooperate with several TU/e departments and dutch industries in the area of lighting and light applications.

 

Projects in the automotive domain include SPITS and Verified that both started recently. Also there we investigate dynamic component loading techniques and resource prediction. In the long run we want to understand both theory and practice of ambient environments that are resource aware, adaptive, and reliable, while maintaining trustworthiness and giving the user feedback about his privacy situation. More general, we want to understand theory and engineering principles of predictable networked systems.

 

A more detailed impression from my work can be obtained from my list of publications and from the SAN site. We try to keep that up-to-date but we do not always succeed.

 

Previous work

Until 2002 I have worked on large-scale simulations of surface catalysis, together with the department of Technical Chemistry. The tool, Carlos, is used by a large number of researchers and becomes available as part of the tooling of Accelrys (Material Studio). Because of this, this work goes into a new phase in which we may restart some new research projects.

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Education

I teach/have tought the following courses

  • Introduction to parallel programming – last time in 2002
  • Computer Networks – last time in 2003
  • Real-time Architectures (spring 2004)
  • Concepts of Distributed Systems (an OOTI course, until 2007)
  • Operating Systems (since spring 2005)
  • Architectures of Distributed Systems (since 2007)

 

I am/have been involved in

  • VLSI programming
  • Multiprocessors (course is given by Electrical Engineering, I give two lectures)

I teach similar material in a few courses at Philips. I work with the Open University on courses. Refer to the education section of SAN for details on courses.

Courses and projects can be found at the SAN site.