CV Anna Foerster Oct 2009 - Faculty of Informatics

ANNA FÖRSTER
(born EGOROVA)
Address:
Faculty of Informatics, UNISI, Via G. Buffi 13, CH-6900 Lugano
Tel: +41 58 666 4123
e-mail:
anna.foerster@ieee.org
Date of Birth: 13 April 1979 Sofia, Bulgaria
Nationality:
Bulgarian
Civil status:
Married
EDUCATION
10/2005 – 05/2009 University of Lugano, PhD in Computer Science.
Dissertation title: Teaching Networks How to Learn: Data Dissemination for Wireless
Sensor Networks with Reinforcement Learning
10/2000 – 07/2004 Freie Universität Berlin, Computer Science (major) , Aeronautical Engineering (minor)
(GPA 1.7/1.0)
09/1998 – 09/2000 Technical University of Sofia, Computer Science (GPA 6.00/6.00)
WORK EXPERIENCE
from 07/2009
University of Lugano, Switzerland
PostDoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Informatics, Sensor Lab
10/2005 – 06/2009 Research and Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Informatics
2007 Instructor of the bachelor course Introduction to Programming in C, 2 ECTS.
2008 Instructor of the bachelor course Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks,
10 ECTS.
McKinsey & Company, Germany
08/2004 – 09/2005 Fellow Consultant at the Business Technology Office, Berlin, Germany. Major projects in
Retail Banking IT and IT Application Services.
Institute of Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin
10/2003 – 7/2004 Research Assistant (part-time) in the Artificial Intelligence Group
10/2001 – 7/2004 Teaching Assistant (part-time)
09/2002 - 7/2004 Research Project „Soccer playing robots – RoboCup“ at the Free University of Berlin,
Artificial Intelligence Group. Participation in the 7 th World Championship for Soccer Robots
Robocup 2003, Padova, Italy; German and European Championship for Soccer Robots
German Open 2003, Paderborn, Germany
Konrad Zuse Zentrum Berlin
04/2001 – 05/2002 Research Student (part-time), Image Processing Department
SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS
08/2009 Networking Networking Women (N^2 Women) travel grant for the 7th ACM International
Conference on Embedded Sensing Systems (SenSys) 2009, Berkeley, California
06/2009 Travel grant for the 27th International Conference on
Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2009
1/2004 e-fellows.net scholar of the month
10/2003 DAAD Award for Best International Student at the Freie Universität Berlin
05/2002 - 11/2004 e-fellows.net scholar
08/2000 DAAD, Summer School scholar at the University of Osnabrück, Germany
SOCIAL WORK
9/2003 – 01/2004 Women's representative at the Faculty of Mathematics and CS, Free University of Berlin.
05/1996 – present Rotary Club associate - Altena, Werdohl, Plettenberg for charity activity in Bulgaria.
LANGUAGES
Bulgarian – native; Russian – native; German - fluent; English – fluent; Italian – basic.

INTERESTS
MEMBERSHIPS
Archeology, Bibliology, Climbing and Mountaineering
ACM, IEEE Communications Society, ICST, Deutscher Alpenverein.
COMMUNITY SERVICE
2008 - present Steering board member of the International OMNeT++ Workshop.
6/2009 TPC member of the 1st International Workshop on Interdisciplinary Research on E-
Health Services and Systems, associated with WoWMoM 2009, Kos, Greece, June 2009.
3/2009 Co-Chair of the 2nd International OMNeT++ Workshop, associated with SIMUTools
2009, Rome, Italy.
3/2008 TPC Co-Chair of the 1st International OMNeT++ Workshop, associated with SIMUTools
2008, Marseilles, France.
reviewer
INVITED TALKS AND TUTORIALS
IEEE Communications Magazine, SENSORS Journal, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular
Technology, Journal on Swarm Intelligence, Simulation journal, IEEE Transactions on
Mobile Computing, Elsevier Computer Communications
10/10/2009 “Optimizing Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with Machine Learning” -
Tutorial at the 1st International Conference on Emerging Network Intelligence
(EMERGING 2009), Malta, 2009.
10/06/2009 “Clique: Role-free Clustering with Q-Learning for WSNs” - invited talk at MICS Annual
Workshop, Lausanne, Switzerland.
17/04/2009 “Clique: Role-free Clustering with Q-Learning for WSNs” - invited talk at University of
Göttingen, Germany, Institute of Computer Science.
PUBLICATIONS
2009 R. V. Kulkarni, A. Förster, G. K. Venayagamoorthy: Computational Intelligence in
Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey, accepted for publication in IEEE Communication
Surveys and Tutorials, to appear in late 2009.
A. Förster and M. Jazayeri: Poster Abstract: Teaching Wireless Sensor Networks
through Testbed Development, Poster abstract in Proceedings of the 7th ACM
International Conference on Embedded Sensor Systems (SenSys), Berkeley, USA,
November 2009, to appear.
A. Förster, A. Förster and A.L.Murphy: Optimal cluster sizes for wireless sensor
networks: An experimental analysis, in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference
on Ad Hoc Networks (AdHocNets), Niagara Falls, Canada, September 2009.
A. Förster and A.L.Murphy: Machine Learning Across the WSN Layers, book chapter
accepted for publication in Wireless Sensor Networks, ISBN 978-3-902613-49-3,
InTechWeb Publishing, editors A. Förster and A. Förster, to appear in eary 2010.
A. Förster, A.L.Murphy: Clique: Role-Free Clustering with Q-Learning for Wireless
Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 29th Int’l Conference on Distributed Computing
Systems (ICDCS 2009), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 2009.
2008 A. Förster, A.L. Murphy, J. Schiller, K. Terfloth: An Efficient Implementation of
Reinforcement Learning Based Routing on Real WSN Hardware, Proceedings of the 4th
IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and
Communications, Avignon, France, October 2008.
A. Förster, A.L. Murphy: Balancing Energy Expenditure in WSNs through
Reinforcement Learning: A Study, Proceedings of the Workshop on Energy associated
with DCOSS 2008, Santorini Island, Greece, June 2008.
2007 A. Förster, A.L. Murphy: FROMS: Feedback Routing for Optimizing Multiple Sinks in
WSN with Reinforcement Learning, Proceedings of the The Third International
Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing,
Melbourne, Australia, December 2007.
A. Förster: Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks:
Guide and Survey, Proceedings of the The Third International Conference on Intelligent
Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing, Melbourne, Australia, December
2007.

A. Egorova-Förster, A.L. Murphy: Exploiting Reinforcement Learning for Multiple Sink
Routing in WSNs, Proceedings of the The Fourth IEEE International Conference on
Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems - poster abstract, Pisa, Italy, October 2007.
A. Egorova-Förster, A. L. Murphy: Exploring Non Uniform Quality of Service for
Extending WSN Lifetime, Proceedings of the 3rd Int. Workshop on Sensor Networks and
Systems for Pervasive Computing (PerSens), White Plains, NY, USA, January 2007.
A. Egorova-Förster, A. L. Murphy: A Feedback Enhanced Learning Approach for
Routing in WSN, in Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
(WMAN), Bern, Switzerland, February 2007.
2006 A. Egorova-Förster, A. Murphy: A Feedback Enhanced Learning Approach for Routing
in WSN, Technical Report of the University of Lugano 2006/03, May 2006.
2005 M. Simon, F. Wiesel, A. Egorova, A. Gloye and R. Rojas: Plug And Play: Fast Automatic
Geometry and Color Calibration for Tracking Mobile Robots, in D. Nardi, M. Riedmiller,
C. Sammut, J. Santos-Victor (Editors): Robocup 2004: Robot Soccer World Cup VIII,
Springer, 2005
2004 A.Egorova: MAAT – Multi Agent Authoring Tool for Autonomous Mobile Robots,
Master Thesis, Free University of Berlin.
A. Gloye, A. Egorova, M. Simon, F. Wiesel, O. Tenchio, R. Rojas: Fast Automatic
Geometry and Color Calibration for Camera Tracked Mobile Robots, submitted for
Robocup International Symposium 2004, Lissabon, Portugal.
A. Gloye, C. Göktekin, A. Egorova, R. Rojas: Learning to Drive and Simulate
Autonomous Mobile Robots, submitted for Robocup International Symposium 2004,
Lissabon, Portugal.
2003 S. Behnke, A. Egorova, A. Gloye, R. Rojas, M. Simon: Predicting away the Delay, in N.N.
(editors): RoboCup-2003: Robot Soccer World Cup VII, Springer, 2004.
A. Egorova, A. Gloye, A. Liers, R. Rojas, M. Schreiber, M. Simon, O. Tenchio, F. Wiesel:
FU-Fighters 2003 (Global Vision), in D. Polani, B. Browning, A. Bonarini, K. Yoshida:
RoboCup-2003 - Proceedings of the International Symposium.
A. Gloye, M. Simon, A. Egorova, F. Wiesel, O. Tenchio, M. Schreiber, R. Rojas: Hardware
and Software of the FU-Fighters 2003, Technical Report B-10-03, FU-Berlin, Juni 2003.
A. Gloye, M. Simon, A. Egorova, F. Wiesel, O. Tenchio, M. Schreiber, S. Behnke, R. Rojas:
Predicting away robot control latency, Technical Report B-08-03, FU-Berlin, Juni 2003.
2002 A. Egorova, A. Gloye, R. Rojas: Video Analysis of Sports Events, Technical Report
B-15-2002, FU-Berlin