Wolfgang Wahlster

Biography

Wolfgang Wahlster, PhD, is a Distinguished Fellow and Member of the Director’s Circle at ICSI, where he served on the Board of Trustees until 2022. He is Professor Emeritus for Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Saarland University and Chief Advisor at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), where he was previously the Founding Director and CEO. 

Dr. Wahlster is one of the leading minds in AI in Europe. His research has focused on AI methods for worker assistance systems, digital twins, architectures for autonomous cars, and cyber-physical production systems for the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), which he conceived in 2010. He was instrumental in making DFKI one of the world’s leading AI research institutions, transforming it into a center for cutting-edge innovations and industry collaborations. At Saarland University, he served as a Professor of Computer Science until 2018, securing funding for two Collaborative Research Centers and a Cluster of Excellence from the German Research Foundation.

Dr. Wahlster has published more than 200 technical papers and 15 books on language technology, intelligent multimodal interfaces, and semantic technologies. He has a PhD and a Diploma degree, both in Computer Science, from the University Hamburg.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• Hall of Fame of German Research (2023)
• Konrad Zuse Medal awarded by the German Computer Science Society, highest academic award in computer science research (2025)
• Rudolf Diesel Medal, Europe’s oldest and most prestigious innovation award (2025)
• German Future Prize (2001)
• Cross of Merit First Class
• Grand Cross of Merit by the Federal President
• Honorary doctorates from the Universities of Linköping, Darmstadt, Maastricht, Prague, Oldenburg
• AAAI Fellow, EurAI Fellow, and GI Fellow

Selected Leadership Activities

• Headed the steering group for the federal government’s national AI standardization roadmap
• Chairman of the Presidium, AI ​​GRID
• Co-spokesperson of the Feldafinger Circle
• Member, Royal Swedish Nobel Prize Academy in Stockholm
• Member, German National Academy Leopoldina
• Member, Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz
• Member, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
• Member, German Academy of Engineering Sciences (acatech)
• Member, Czech Academy of Engineering Sciences (EACR)
• Member, selection committee member of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
• Member, International Advisory Council (IAC) of the BRTA (Basque Research and Technology Alliance) in San Sebastian
• Member, International Scientific Advisory Board of ROBOPROX , the Czech Cluster of Excellence for Robotics and Industrial Informatics
• Serves on 10 industrial supervisory and technical advisory boards across large companies, medium-sized businesses, and start-ups

Areas of Expertise

• Planning, Decision-Making, and Intelligent Agents
• Human-AI Collaboration and Teaming
• AI Ethics, Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• Machine Translation and Multilingual Language Models
• Conversational AI, Dialogue Systems, and Chatbots
• Multimodal NLP (Text + Vision, Speech, and Sensor Fusion)
• Embedded Systems, IoT Devices, and Cyber-Physical Systems
• Multimodal Perception (Vision + Language + Audio)
• Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design
• Interoperability, Standards, and Data Sharing Frameworks

ICSI Activity