Wolfgang Wahlster

Wolfgang Wahlster is a German computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher, professor of computer science at Saarland University, and founding director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, known as DFKI. As its long-serving CEO and scientific director since 1996, he built DFKI into one of the world's largest AI research institutions, employing more than 1,000 people and producing over 100 spin-off companies by 2019. He has published more than 200 technical papers and twelve books on user modeling, spoken dialogue systems and multimodal user interfaces, and coined the term Industrie 4.0 in 2010 for the integration of cyber-physical systems into manufacturing. He received Germany's Future Prize in 2001 for his work on intelligent user interfaces and was inducted into the Hall of Fame of German Research in 2023.