Prof. Dr. Prof. h.c. Andreas Dengel

Andreas Dengel is Professor at the Department of Computer Science at University Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) and Executive Director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Head of the Smart Data and Knowldege Services research area at DFKI and of the DFKI Deep Learning Competence Center. His research focuses on machine learning, pattern recognition, quantified learning, data mining, semantic technologies and document analysis.

Career - From 1986 until today

Andreas studied computer science with a minor in economics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern from 1980 to 1986. He completed his doctorate in computer science at the University of Stuttgart in 1989. After working at IBM, Siemens as well as a guest research stay at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, he was appointed to a professorship for the Chair of Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in 1993. At the same time, he became scientific director at DFKI and took over the management of a research area that is now called "Smart Data & Knowledge Services". Since 2009, he has held another professorship (kyakuin) in the Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems at Osaka Metropolitan University with teaching and examination rights. At this university, he was also named "Distinguished Honorary Professor" (tokubetu eiyo kyoju) in March 2018, a distinction received by only five researchers within 135 years.

Science - Worldwide activities and publications

Andreas has chaired numerous international conferences and serves on the editorial boards of international journals and book series. He has written or edited 14 books and is the author of more than 600 peer-reviewed scientific publications, many of which have received Best Paper Awards. To date, he has supervised more than 500 doctoral, master's, and bachelor's theses. In addition to a number of keynote lectures at international meetings and conferences, Andreas has given invited technical presentations at numerous prestigious universities and research institutions. These include MIT, Stanford University, PARC, UC Berkeley, CMU, London School of Economics, Cambridge University, ATR, NII, Tokyo University, Chinese Academy of Science, and Google Research or MS Research. Also activities as a lecturer, e.g., in the Joint Executive MBA Program at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, the University of Texas in Austin and Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China, are part of Andreas' previous activities. Four years ago, Andreas founded the graduate school MIND at the Department of Computer Science. Here, about 20 students are funded by scholarships from the industry. Furthermore, he promotes numerous exchange cooperations with international institutes or universities. These include, for example, exchange programs with NICT, NAIST, AIST and the Nakatani Foundation. The joint-credit master's programs in artificial intelligence he initiated with Kyushu University and Osaka Metropolitan University, which have been in place for more than 10 years, have also led to many reciprocal research visits by students over the years.

Business & Consulting - Bringing science into (business) practice

In the years of his scientific work, Andreas has already acquired more than 100 million euros in third-party funding and led large collaborative projects. He is also the founder, initiator and mentor of many successful start-up companies, three of which have been awarded the "Pioneer Spirit Award", first prize in the "1,2,3 GO" start-up competition and the "Cebit Innovation Award". In 2015, he was honored for his services with the "Gründungsförderer des Jahres" award (= Start-up Promoter of the Year).

He is also the initiator and head of the Competence Center for Deep Learning at DFKI, which in 2016 was the only one in Germany (one of eight worldwide) to receive an award from NVIDIA as part of the NVAIL Excellence Program. Andreas is also a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Chairman of the Flexible Factory Partner Alliance (FFPA), and a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech). He advises scientific institutions, research programs and ministries in Germany and abroad. In 2009, for example, he was a member of the National IT Summit's working group on "Service- and Consumer-Friendly IT", which advises the German government on information technology issues (IT Summit). Andreas is a member of the German platform for AI "Learning Systems" and was appointed AI Ambassador of the state government of Rhineland-Palatinate in September 2020. In 2021, he also became a member of the Executive Board of the International Neurodegenerative Disorders Research Center (INDRC) and a member of the Biotech Advisory Board of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Andreas is also active as a juror, e.g. he was the German representative on the ICT Prize Executive Jury of the European Council for Applied Science (Euro-CASE) for many years or is a member of the jury of the German Demography Prize, which is awarded annually in Berlin. Over the years, Andreas has also taken on various reviewer roles. These include: Advisory Board Member NEC Computers and Communication Innovation Research Labs (CCIL), Advisory Board Member Computer Vision Center, University of Barcelona, Advisory Board Member Centre of Excellence on Semantic Technologies at Malaysian Institute of Microelectronic Systems (MIMOS), Advisory Board Member In'l Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), reviewer at e. g. DFG, BMBF, German Science Council, Research Council of Norway (RNC), Dutch Research Council (DRC), Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Austrian Science Fund (ASF), etc.

Awards, prizes and honors - A selection

In addition to the honors already mentioned, Andreas has received other important recognitions for his work, some of which are mentioned below. Back in 1997, Andreas already received one of the most prestigious personal science awards in Germany, the Alcatel/SEL Award for Technical Communication, for his scientific achievements. In 2010, he was invited to Google's Zeitgeist conference in London with the Text 2.0 system as one of the four technological highlights of the year. In 2019, Andreas was selected as one of the most influential scientists in 50 years of AI history in Germany by a jury commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for his research in document analysis. In the same year, he also received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Int'l Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) in Sydney, Australia. Finally, in 2021, Andreas was awarded the oldest Japanese order, the "The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon" in the name of His Majesty Emperor Naruhito and in 2022 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the State Rhineland-Palatinate.