Professor of Computer Science named Honorary Citizen of the City of Saarbrücken

Mayor Charlotte Britz awarded the honorary citizenship of the state capital Saarbrücken to Professor Wolfgang Wahlster. Credits: Klaus Bastian

Yesterday evening Mayor Charlotte Britz awarded the honorary citizenship of the state capital Saarbrücken to Professor Wolfgang Wahlster. With this award, the city of Saarbrücken honors Wahlster’s achievements “in the successful establishment and further development of Saarbrücken as a leading location for information technology “. This makes Wahlster the first scientist to receive this honor.
Wolfgang Wahlster, born in Saarbrücken in 1953, studied computer science and computational linguistics in Hamburg starting in 1972. His dissertation is entitled “Natural Language Argumentation in Dialogue Systems: AI Methods for Reconstructing and Explaining Approximative Inference Processes”.
He was appointed to Saarland University in 1982, followed in 1987 by his visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA. In 1988, his appointment as scientific founding director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) marked the beginning of his worldwide reputation as an outstanding scientist.
Since then, he has received awards for, among other things, his research work on artificial intelligence: the Future Prize of the Federal President, the Federal Cross of Merit First Class, and three honorary doctorates. The Association for Computing Machinery honored him in Tokyo in 2016 as the first European to receive the renowned ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award for his life’s work.
Wolfgang Wahlster was president of the World Association for Artificial Intelligence based in Palo Alto. He was admitted to the Wall of Fame as an AI pioneer and to the Hall of Fame of the greatest IT personalities as an “AI pope”.
He is also a member of the Royal Swedish Nobel Prize Academy, the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academy of Engineering Sciences (acatech), and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as well as a full member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. /gb