Annual Report 2007/2008 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH ...

complementing the successful Bonn-Aachen Institute of Information technology (B-IT)
and provides stipends for 20 Ph.D. students. It will be run by RWTH Aachen University
and our partners University of Bonn and Fraunhofer Institute Center Birlinghoven. The
speaker of the research school is Matthias Jarke.
• The Collaborative Research Center IMPROVE (Sonderforschungsbereich 476) published
its final report in form of 851 pages strong book, M. Nagl, W. Marquardt (Eds.),
Collaborative and Distributed Chemical Engineering, LNCS 4970. The results have lead to
a Transfer Center (TB 61).
• The team of the Knowledge-Based Systems Group won the 2007 German Championship
and the World Championship in the Robocup league ‘Robocup@Home’ in Atlanta, USA.
In 2008, they won the German Championship and became runner-up at the World
Championships in Suzhou, China.
• The department hosted several prestigious conferences and conventions, e.g.:
- The Conference “Zukunft Ingenieurwissenschaften – Zukunft Deutschland” (Future of
the Engineering Sciences – Future of Germany) by 4ING (Union of Faculty
Conferences in Mechanical Engineering, Electric Engineering, Civil Engineering, and
Informatics), together with the First Common Plenary Assembly of 4ING Faculty
Conferences 2008 was organized by Computer Science Chair 3.
- The Computer Science Chairs 5 and 9 organized BTW 2007, the largest German Data
Base conference, with roughly 300 participants in Aachen.
• Faculty members have been active in numerous key positions in the scientific community,
just to name a few:
- Manfred Nagl is Chairman of the German Informatics Faculties Conference
(Fakultätentag) and Chairman of the Board of 4ING (see above).
- Otto Spaniol was appointed “Fellow of the German Informatics Society (GI)”.
- Matthias Jarke finished his 8 years terms as DFG elected reviewer for practical
computer science and as President of the German Informatics Society (GI) on December
31, 2007. He was elected Deputy Chairman of the Fraunhofer Group “Information and
Communication Technology”.
- Prof. Wehrle was awarded “Nachwuchswissenschaftler des Jahres 2007” (Junior
Researcher of the Year 2007) by the journal „Die ZEIT“ and the German University
Association (Deutscher Hochschulverband).
• Finally, our colleague Wolfgang Thomas had his 60 th birthday. This was celebrated by a
two days long scientific colloquium “Automata and Logic: History and Perspectives” with
over 160 participants.
After this brief list of appetizers, we would like to invite you to browse through the following
pages where many more accounts of our activities can be found. We also invite you to contact
us or the respective members of the department if we have stimulated a deeper interest in one
of the topics or if you want to share your feedback with us.
Finally we would like to thank Kai Jakobs for compiling this report.
Aachen, November 2008
Leif Kobbelt
Spokesman of the Computer Science
Department until September 2008
2
Stefan Kowalewski
Current Spokesman of the Computer Science
Department