ECDF Professor David Bermbach has accepted an appointment at the Technical University of Berlin as of December 20, 2023. He will head the Scalable Software Systems department at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This is the second professorship to emerge from the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) and be permanently appointed to one of Berlin's universities.

David Bermbach studied industrial engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and subsequently completed his doctorate. From 2017 until his appointment, he was Professor of Mobile Cloud Computing at the ECDF and the Technical University of Berlin. In his new position, Bermbach will initially focus on the areas of serverless computing and benchmarking in continuous integration processes: "I am very pleased to be able to continue researching and teaching at TU Berlin in the future. We are currently working on using benchmarking to ensure the quality of software systems before they go live. We are also trying to better understand and further improve the scalability of serverless computing platforms."

During his time as a junior professor at the ECDF, Bermbach conducted research on various interdisciplinary projects. One major success in the field of citizen science is the SimRa (Safety in Cycling) project. The project collects data in a data protection-compliant manner on where in the city there are clusters of hazards for cyclists, what type these are, whether they occur more frequently over time or locally and where the main traffic flows are on bicycles. To this end, the project developed a smartphone app that records routes using GPS data and uses acceleration sensors and AI to detect dangerous situations such as sudden braking, swerving or even falls. After the ride, cyclists are asked to categorize and comment on the dangerous situations detected. "SimRa is now available in around 100 regions, even in Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands. One highlight of the project was being awarded the German Cycling Prize 2022," says Bermbach. 

In the GeoVER: project (geo-warnings for the transport sector using extended reality in the air traffic application area), Bermbach and his team worked with Deutsche Telekom to develop an expandable IT system that can be used flexibly for all transport sectors and can distribute data from different data sources to a wide variety of recipients in a targeted manner and in real time. These could be drones in the approach path of an airport or traffic jams, for example. "For the project, we have taken the use case of air traffic as an example and developed an XR application for visualizing geo-warnings in cooperation with the Schönhagen airfield in Brandenburg," explains Bermbach.

The permanent professorship, which Bermbach took up in December 2023, is already the second of up to ten ECDF professorships that the state of Berlin will establish permanently and fund additionally  at Berlin universities. "I am delighted that with David Bermbach's appointment another ECDF-professorship is being established permenently. The digital transformation is a topic of the present and the future and I am delighted that we will be able to retain the bright minds of the ECDF for Berlin academia," says Prof. Dr. Gesche Joost, Executive Director of the ECDF and Professor of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts.