Biography

Christian Bettstetter

Christian Bettstetter (Photo by J. Puch, 2014)

Christian Bettstetter is professor and head of the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems at the University of Klagenfurt. He is also the founding scientific director of Lakeside Labs GmbH, a research and innovation company.

After studying electrical engineering and information technology at Technische Universität München, he joined the communication networks group led by Jörg Eberspächer, where he received his doctorate in engineering (Dr.-Ing., summa cum laude) with a dissertation on wireless ad hoc networks. He gained experience in the USA as an intern and guest student. After graduation, he worked as a senior researcher at DOCOMO Euro-Labs before becoming a professor in 2005.

Bettstetter and his team work on wireless connectivity and self-organization in networked systems, with applications spanning telecommunications, IoT, and mobile robotics. Current projects investigate interference, synchronization, industrial sensor networks, and communications and path planning of drones. He coordinates an interdisciplinary research cluster on self-organizing systems and acted as faculty member in the Karl Popper school on networked autonomous aerial vehicles.

His teaching portfolio comprises undergraduate lectures on electricity and magnetism, two graduate lectures on mobile communications and networking, and multidisciplinary seminars on networks. His dedication to teaching was recognized through the 2022 Prize for Excellence in Teaching, awarded for the high quality of lectures and his didactic concept. Bettstetter also coauthored the book “GSM: Architecture, protocols and services.”

Scientific awards include the outstanding publication award from the Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (“Preis der ITG” in 2004) and best paper awards from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) (2008 and 2009), the ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM) (2017), the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) (2019), and the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS) (2021). The federal state of Carinthia honored Bettstetter with the “Würdigungspreis” in Science and Engineering (2018), a prize awarded every four years in recognition of scientific achievements.

Bettstetter has been a reviewer for over a hundred projects of the European Commission, the European Research Council, and different national science funds in Europe. His engagement in university management and administration includes memberships in the senate and search committees. He served as a committee member in more than a hundred conferences and workshops, founder and co-organizer of Lakeside Research Days (biannually since 2008), area editor for ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (2005–2014), program chair of the International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (2011), steering board member of the ESF-funded program MiNEMA (2006–2009), and organizing committee member of ACM MobiCom (2005). Bettstetter is an active science communicator, reporting about his and related research on social media.