Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University, Saarbrücken. He was the Scientific Director of the Verbmobil consortium on spontaneous speech translation, the Smart Kom consortium on multimodal dialog systems and the Smart Web consortium on mobile multimodal access to semantic web services. He was awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Award) in 2001 and he received the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006. He is the Chief Academic Advisor for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the Research Union of the German Government and he is a member or chair of many key international scientific advisory and governance boards and a member of many academies. He has chaired and given invited talks at the key international conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence; he is a board member of the key AI journals; he is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) and he received the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award at IJCAI-13, the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, in recognition of his substantial contributions, as well as his extensive service to the field of artificial intelligence throughout his career. His research interests include multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, semantic web services, semantic product memories and cyber-physical production systems.
