Courses
Distributed systems
This is a master-level course, generally taught in November-December. It is based on a book I co-authored with Andrew Tanenbaum. The course covers all aspects of modern distributed systems, concentrating somewhat on practical issues in designing large-scale systems. Consider it to be a course that is very close to what I do as a researcher. I've been teaching this course for about ten years now and still consider it to be one of my favorites. Every year, I tend to learn a bit more from my mistakes in class.
Graph theory and complex networks
How does a systems guy get into teaching a first-year course on graph theory? First and foremost, because it's just fun. The real challenge, of course, is teaching math to informatics students such that they may actually discover relevance and enjoy the material at the same time. In this course, the fun part comes from concentrating on what are called complex networks. These networks are huge, appear everywhere, and have lots of things in common independent from their application. If you suspect that these networks may have some relation to my research, you are right. The graph theory is there to understand and appreciate subjects like random networks, scale-free networks, small-world networks, and network analysis. The course is intended for a broad audience of informatics students, covering students interested in artificial intelligence, information sciences, and computer science.
Gossiping in distributed systems
This is a PhD-level course comprising approximately six hours of lectures. It's one of the more challenging courses that I continuously change. It covers lots of basic stuff about epidemic protocols, largely coming from my own research into large-scale distributed systems. This is typically one of those courses that can come to life only because of all the great people I have had a chance to collaborate with. Special thanks always goes to Márk Jelasity who introduced me to this topic (without perhaps knowing how he got himself into this mess).