Professor Jörg Siekmann turns 85

Professor Jörg Siekman, Photo: © Anja Joest

On 5 August, Prof. Dr. Jörg Siekmann will celebrate his 85th birthday. A pioneer of the field of artificial intelligence in Germany, Siekmann served as a professor of computer science at Saarland University and director of the Deduction and Multi-Agent Systems Research Division at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.

Born in Eberbach am Neckar, he first completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner and went on to obtain an Ing. grad. in wood technology from the Rosenheim School of Engineering. He subsequently obtained his Abitur through adult education at the renowned Braunschweig-Kolleg and studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen, as well as computer science at the University of Essex in the UK. There, he was awarded a Master of Science in Computing in 1972, obtained his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence in 1976 with a thesis on unification theory, and then returned to Germany.

Since then, Jörg Siekmann has worked first as a research assistant and, from 1980, as a university assistant at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe, where he established a research group on artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of deduction systems and, together with others, founded the influential Collaborative Research Centre 314 on AI. In 1983, he was appointed to Germany’s first professorship in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Kaiserslautern, where, together with several colleagues, he founded the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). The Springer series ‘Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence’ (LNAI), which he founded, gained international prominence.

In the summer term of 1991, Siekmann accepted a post at Saarland University and, until 2006, held a dual role as Professor of Computer Science and as Head of Research at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). On the Saarbrücken campus, his roles included serving as spokesperson for Collaborative Research Centre 378 ‘Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Processes’; in 1995, as a visiting professor at JiaoTong University in Shanghai, he initiated the cooperation with our university; together with his second wife and colleague Erica Melis, he served as scientific director of the ‘Centre for e-learning Technology’; and he was a senior professor and coordinator for digital education at Saarland University.

The honouree has made an outstanding contribution to establishing ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as a field of research in Germany and to creating the organisational framework for this discipline within the ‘German Informatics Society’, which awarded him the title of ‘Fellow’ in 2002 and later named him one of the ten most influential AI scientists. Overall, he has made significant contributions to AI research, taken on extensive responsibilities within the academic community, and advised research groups, governments and industrial companies at both national and international levels. His body of work comprises around 900 publications in his fields of research: deduction systems, proof planning, unification theory, e-learning for mathematics, as well as Buddhism and Artificial Intelligence.
Unfortunately, for health reasons, the honouree is currently unable to host public celebrations.

Further information: 
Dr Wolfgang Müller, University Archives
Email: wolfgang.mueller(at)uni-saarland.de, dr.wolfgang-mueller(at)t-online.de