Ipke Wachsmuth

Ipke Wachsmuth, born on 27 March 1950 in Rehren, district Schaumburg, is a German computer scientist in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He obtained a doctoral degree in computer science from the University of Hannover in 1980 and held positions at Osnabrück University, Northern Illinois University and IBM Germany. He is now Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Bielefeld University, where he headed the artificial intelligence group from 1989 to 2014, and from 2002 until 2009 he was director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld. His research mainly focused on human-machine interaction and virtual reality. He is known for connecting classical symbolic techniques of knowledge representation with elements of dynamic gestures and facial expressions, as exemplified by the development of the embodied agent Max, and since the 1990s he has been a driving force behind the Interdisciplinary College, an annual spring school in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics and philosophy.