When Michael joined Cisco more than 15 years ago he specialised in infrastructure security, where he published many papers, RFCs and a book.

He observed that the main challenge in security is its complexity, which lead him to research complexity in detail. He is now co-chairing the Network Complexity Research Group in the IRTF.

Michael believes that today’s complexity problems can only be solved by making networks self-managing, thus he started development efforts on Autonomic Networking in 2010 and has since been leading Cisco's architecture work in Autonomic Networking.