Fritz Hohl - the business life

Current Job

Current Areas of Interest

• AI: tools, application areas, infrastructure
• Natural Language Processing: Automatic translation of movie dialogues

Past Areas of Interest

During my Sony time

During my work at Sony I worked on internal projects in several areas such as:

• Ad-hoc networks
• Computer Security
• LifeLogs
• Wireless Systems (Magnetic, UWB, 60GHz) for audio and/or video transmission
• Natural Language Processing in all forms and applications

Mobile Agents

For my Diploma Thesis and Ph.D. I focused on Mobile Agents. I worked on the Mole project, a publically available Mobile Agent System written in Java for which I wrote the first version and invented the project name. Being part of this project I co-organized two conferences, the Mobile Agents 97 (MA'97) and the Mobile Agents 98 (MA'98). For providing a central resource on mobile agent systems I wrote the Mobile Agent List (MAL) where mobile agent system authors could enter and maintain entries on their systems themselves (but which is now defunct).

For my Ph.D. I specialized on the security aspect of mobile agents. I maintained the (now grossly outdated) web bibliography on Security in Mobile Agent Systems.

Infrastructures for Spatial-Aware Applications

In early 1998 I had some ideas which eventually became the first Nexus project. The aim of Nexus wass to create an Open Global Infrastructure for Spatial-Aware Applications, i.e. a distributed platform that offers support for applications that deal with spatial aspects. Until I left University after my PhD, I also worked in this project. What started as an idea to find application areas for mobile agents was in the end a large research project (Sonderforschungsbereich) with about 20 full-time researchers and a 9-year project scope (in fact this is the 3rd project). Also this project name was invented by me.

Context Systems

In 2000 - 2002, I worked on infrastructures for Context-Aware applications, a.k.a. Context Systems. Since 2001, I did this working on an EU research project called Youngster.

Publications

Books

• K. Rothermel and F. Hohl (eds.) (1998): Mobile Agents, Second International Workshop, MA'98, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1477, Springer-Verlag.

Talks

(November 23, 1999): Mobile Agents and Active Networks. Tutorial at Smartnet'99 - The Fifth IFIP Conference on Intelligence in Networks 22-26 November 1999, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand.

(November 25, 1999): Mobile Agents and Active Networks. Invited Talk at Smartnet'99 - The Fifth IFIP Conference on Intelligence in Networks 22-26 November 1999, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand.

(March 2. - 5., 1999): A Protocol Preventing Blackbox Tests of Mobile Agents, ITG/VDE Fachtagung Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen (KiVS'99), Darmstadt, Germany.

(November 5, 1998): Mobile Agent Security and Reliability, Talk at Panel "Does Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) Offer Any Benefits to Mobile Code's Security Woes?", Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE'98), Paderborn, Germany

(July 21, 1998): A Model of Attacks of Malicious Hosts Against Mobile Agents, 4th ECOOP Workshop on Mobile Object Systems (MOS'98): Secure Internet Computations, Brüssel, Belgien.

(March 4, 1998): Sicherheit in Mobile-Agenten-Systemen. ZGDV-Seminar "Mobile Agenten -Überblick   und Einsatz". Darmstadt, Germany.

(October 28, 1997): Protecting Mobile Agents From Malicious Hosts by Using Blackbox Security. UMBC Workshop on Mobile Agents and Security. Baltimore, USA

(October 17, 1997): Protecting Mobile Agents From Malicious Hosts by Using Blackbox Security. Dagstuhl-Seminar "Mobile Software Agents". Dagstuhl, Germany.

(September 24, 1997): Internet. Talk at IBM Herrenberg, Germany.

(November 1996): Mole - eine Plattform für Mobile Agenten. Siemens AG, München, Germany.

(September 24, 1996): Internet. Talk at IBM Herrenberg, Germany.

(September 10, 1996): Finden von Mobilen Agenten in einem weitverteilten System. 2. Deutsches Mobile Agenten Treffen. Waldfischbach, Germany.

What I did during my studies

Softwarepraktikum I (1991)

Definition einer rechnerunabhängigen Terminalsprache und Implementierung eines Prototyps in Smalltalk-80 (Definition of a computer-independent terminal language and implementation of a prototype in Smalltalk-80)

Studienarbeit (1994)

• Verwendung von Typen in Smalltalk (Usage of Typing in Smalltalk)
• Source code of above

Diploma Thesis (1995)

Konzeption eines einfachen Agentensystems und Implementation eines Prototyps (Conception of a simple agent system and implementation of a prototype)