Klara Nahrstedt, the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in computer science at the UI, has been selected to receive the Humboldt Research Award.
The award, given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in Bonn, Germany, is named for the Prussian naturalist and explorer, and recognizes lifetime research achievements. The award includes a prize of 60,000 Euros (about $85,000 at current exchange rates). Recipients also are invited to conduct research of their choice with colleagues in Germany.The foundation grants up to 100 such awards annually. Recipients must first be nominated, then elected for recognition by a panel of international scholars from a variety of disciplines.
The award is given to “eminent non-German researchers whose fundamental discoveries, insights or new theories have had a lasting impact on their field of specialization and who are expected to produce cutting edge results.” Nahrstedt’s seminal research in multimedia systems has established her as one of the world’s leading experts in the field. She is a chief architect of research on 3-D tele-immersion as well as other distributed multimedia systems at Illinois.
As one of the first researchers in Quality of Service in the 1990s, Nahrstedt defined the concept of media quality in distributed networked systems. A principal investigator for the Multimedia Operating Systems and Networking (MONET) Research Group, she leads students in research focusing on multimedia operating systems and communication protocols, QoS middleware and large-scale distributed systems, multimedia security and trustworthy computing systems, advanced tele-immersive and multimedia applications, and high-speed QoS routing and ad hoc networks. Her research group is ranked among the best in the world in the area of network quality of service and quality of service management.
Nahrstedt chairs the Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia Special Interest Group, which provides a forum for researchers, engineers and practitioners in all aspects of multimedia computing, communication, storage and applications.
