Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster
is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. In 2000, he was coopted as a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the same university. In addition, he is the Head of the Intelligent User Interfaces Lab at DFKI.
He received his diploma and doctoral degree (1981) in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Since 1975 he has been working in the field as a principal investigator in intelligent user interface projects, including:
AiA, HAM-ANS, MIAU, PAN, PHI , PPP, PRACMA, RAP, READY, REAL, VITRA, WIP, XTRA
He was the Scientific Director of the VERBMOBIL consortium on spontaneous speech translation (1993-2000) as well as the SmartKom consortium on multimodal dialog systems (1999-2003) and currently serves as the Scientific Director of the SmartWeb consortium on mobile multimodal access to semantic web services (2004-2008).
He has published more than 150 technical papers and 6 books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. His current research includes multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, smart navigation systems, semantic web services, and resource-adaptive cognitive technologies. He is the editor of the book "Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation" and the Co-Editor of the Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces.
He is an AAAI Fellow (elected in 1993), an ECCAI Fellow (since 1999), and a GI Fellow (since 2004). In 1991, he received the Fritz Winter Award, and in 1995, an ITEA Prize (Information Technology European Award) for his research on cooperative user interfaces.
In 1998, he has been awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Institute of Technology at Linkoeping University, Sweden. In 2001, he received a second Honorary Doctorate from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.
He serves as a member of the Executive Board of the AI section of the German Informatics Association (GI) and the Collaborative Research Center 'Resource-adaptive Cognitive Processes' ( SFB 378).
Prof. Wahlster was the Conference Chair for IJCAI-93 in Chambery, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of IJCAII from 1991-1993, a Trustee of IJCAII from 1989-1999, the ECAI-96 Programme Chair and the Programme Co-Chair of ACL/EACL-97.
He is the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the OFFIS Institute (Oldenburg, Germany), a member of the Scientific Board of Volkswagen AG's corporate university AutoUni (Wolfsburg, Germany), a member of the Scientific Council of IRST (Trento, Italy), the International Advisory Board of the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information (NICI, Nijmegen, the Netherlands), the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Swedish Information Technology Institute (SITI, Stockholm, Sweden), the Japanese Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI, Tokyo, Japan), the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA, Paris, France), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI, Galway, Ireland), the Board of Trustees and the Executive Committee of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, Berkeley, USA), the iCORE Research Advisory Committee (IRAC, Calgary, Canada), the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning (AICML, Edmonton, Canada), and the Information Society Technologies Advisory Board (ISTAG) for FP6 of the European Commission (Brussels, Belgium).
He has served as the Chair of ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, from 1996-2000. In 2000, he was the President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
In 2000, he was the first AI researcher to receive the Beckurts Award, one of Germany's most prestigious awards for scientific and technological innovations.
In 2001, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Dr. Johannes Rau, presented the German Future Prize to Prof. Wahlster for his work on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. Prof. Wahlster was the first computer scientist to receive Germany's highest scientific prize that is awarded each year for outstanding innovations in technology, engineering, or the natural sciences.
Since 2001 he serves as the scientific spokesman of the Feldafing Circle, an association for promoting joint internet research by academic and industrial partners in Germany.
In 2002, he was the second German computer scientist elected Full Member of the German Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz.
In 2003, he was the first German computer scientist elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm.
In 2004, he was elected Full Member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, that was founded in 1652, and of Acatech, the Council for Engineering Sciences at the Union of the German Academies of Science and Humanities. In 2004, he was also appointed Saarland Ambassador and elected as a member of the Münchner Kreis, a supra-national association dedicated to communications research.
Recently he has been appointed Chairman of the HERMES Awards 2006 Jury.
He is the Scientific Editor-in-Chief of ETAI, the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.
Prof. Wahlster is a member of the Editorial Board or Advisory Board of the following journals:
Annals
of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Applied Artificial
Intelligence
Artificial
Intelligence
Cognitive
Science Quarterly
Gehirn
& Geist
Informatik
- Forschung und Entwicklung
User Modeling and User-Adapted
Interaction
Web Semantics
In addition, he is a member of the editorial board of the following book series:
Artificial
Intelligence, Springer
Cognitive
Technologies, Springer
DISKI, Dissertationen zur
Künstlichen Intelligenz, infix