Tobias Stark (né Blass)

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About me

Since 2021 I work as a software developer at Apex.AI, focusing on execution management and predictable middleware implementation.

Previously, I was a PhD student at Bosch Corporate Research and the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science. My academic advisor is Björn Brandenburg at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS). At Bosch, I closely worked with Arne Hamann, Dirk Ziegenbein and Ralph Lange.

I studied computer science at Saarland University with a minor in mathematics from 2011 to 2016. In 2016, I completed my master's degree on on static worst-case execution time analysis under the supervision of Jan Reineke. I then left academia to gain some industry work experience as an embedded software developer at Rohde & Schwarz.

Informal Writing

I occasionally write articles on the Apex.AI blog:

PhD research

My PhD research focused on the practical application of real-time theory in highly dynamic systems, in particular mobile robots using ROS 2. These systems are characterized by strongly varying execution times, unpredictable environments, complex software stacks, and extensive reuse of preexisting standard components. Traditional real-time techniques like ahead-of-time schedulability analysis are therefore difficult to apply and require prohibitive effort.

To address this problem, I worked on mechanisms for developing latency-sensitive and (soft) real-time applications that are easy to use, can adapt to changing situations, and support compositional software construction.

From 2019 to 2021, I organized the Real-Time Systems Reading Group at MPI-SWS, previously led by Arpan Gujarati.

Publications

Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

Theses

Teaching

I have been a student TA for the following lectures