Kay Römer is professor at and director of the Institute for Technical Informatics at Graz University of Technology, Austria. He also heads the Field of Expertise Information, Communication & Computing with more than 100 senior researchers from three faculties. He obtained his Doctorate in computer science from ETH Zurich in 2005 with a thesis on Wireless Sensor Networks. As a senior researcher, he led the network-related research activities of the Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich between 2005 and 2009. From 2009 to 2013 he held a professorship at University of Lübeck in Germany. Kay Römer is an internationally recognized expert on networked embedded systems.
He has published numerous often-cited results at and regularly serves on the program committees of the leading conferences in his field. He delivered invited keynote talks at international conferences, served as program co-chair for the leading conferences in his field such as ACM SenSys 2011, ACM/IEEE IPSN 2013 or IEEE SECON 2021, and co-directed five international summer schools. Kay Römer served and serves as an associate editor for leading journals such as IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Computers, or ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.
He also heads the steering committee of the International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN). Kay Römer's research interests encompass wireless networking, fundamental services, programming models, dependability, and safety of networked embedded systems, in particular Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Sensor Networks.
His research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, by the European Commission, through industry partners, by the German Science Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research, and Economy, the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, as well as the Austrian Science Fund. He was the scientific coordinator of the EU FP7 FIRE project RELYonIT on dependable networking in the Internet of Things. He also coordinated the TU Graz LEAD-Project "Dependable Internet of Things", the first TU Graz research excellence center comprising more than 40 professors, postdocs, and doctoral students.
He currently coordinates for TU Graz the FWF Doctoral College “DENISE: Dependable Electronic-Based Systems”. He also leads the research area "Cognitive Products" in the COMET research competence center Pro2Future - Products and Production Systems of the Future. He was also a partner in numerous further excellence initiatives, among others a German Excellence Cluster, a Swiss National Competence Center in Research (NCCR), a European Network of Excellence (NoE), and an FFG Lead-Project.
Kay Römer supervised more than 20 dissertations, two of them graduated under the auspices of the president of the Republic of Austria - the highest possible distinction for academic achievements for a doctoral degree in Austria. Kay Römer is also an experienced reviewer who served on numerous panels for international funding agencies, such as the German Science Foundation (Excellence Initiative), Science Foundation Ireland (Centers for Research Training), Academy of Finland (Limits of ICT), Romanian Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (Competence Centers), but also for numerous regional agencies in Belgium, Spain, and Austria.