Professor Theo Kanter, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences.
Professor Theo Kanter, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences.

“The rush has been centralization – to push decision-making to the cloud,” Professor Theo Kanter at Department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University warns during his keynote address to the 7th Annual Conference on Information Society and Technology in Serbia this week. “But what happens when the connection to the Cloud is interrupted? Do cars crash into each other on the motorway? Do critical industrial systems suddenly stop? Do power grids suddenly turn off?”

“I suggest that not enough importance has been attached to pushing decision-making from the Cloud and edge/gateway to the endpoints and sensors,” Prof. Kanter says. “In my opinion, de-centralization is absolutely critical to public safety and the success of the IoT, including the Industrial Internet.”

“Autonomous vehicles need to sense each other and be able to respond instantly, even if the connection to the Cloud is temporarily unavailable,” Prof. Kanter says. “This means that vital decision-making has to be done at the endpoint – the vehicle itself. The same is true for many different applications.”

Wide-ranging research

Prof. Kanter’s work at Stockholm University has focused on new ways of connecting the components in industrial processes with vastly improved levels of autonomy.

During his career, Theo Kanter has held a number of leading positions in telecommunications research. As senior scientist at Ericsson Research and the Wireless Center at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, his research explored adaptive and context-aware mobile multimedia communication. The results had a dramatic impact on Industry, since the prototypes allowed multimedia services to be moved to the Internet, both for cellular and fixed access.

In 2007, prof. Kanter was appointed full Professor of Computer Science in the area of Distributed Systems at the Mid Sweden University. In 2012, he was appointed Unit Director within the Department of Computer and System Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University and promoted to Professor of Computer Science. His work focuses on Immersive Networking research. This research established a platform for supporting and creating applications that utilize ad‐hoc Context Networks via heterogeneous networks, and selected in several IoT & Cloud related testbeds in EU projects, in collaboration with international research networks.

Theo G. Kanter,
Professor of Computer Science, Distributed Systems
Department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University
mail: kanter@dsv.su.se