High international honors for three Saarbrücken computer scientists

The newly appointed ACM Fellows Prof. Bernt Schiele, Prof. Joël Ouaknine and Prof. Thomas Lengauer (from left to right). Photos: MPI INF; MPI SWS

Yesterday, the Saarbrücken professors of computer science Bernt Schiele, Joël Ouaknine and Thomas Lengauer were appointed “Fellows” by the largest computer science association in the world, the “Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)”. The appointment honors their influential contributions in various areas of computer science. Worldwide 71 new ACM Fellows were elected this year, twelve of them in Europe, four in Germany and three of them in Saarbrücken.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. According to its own records, the ACM has more than 100,000 members worldwide.

Professor Bernt Schiele has been scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and professor of computer science at Saarland University since 2010. At the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, he heads the department “Computer Vision and Machine Learning”. He was appointed ACM Fellow for his contributions to large-scale object recognition, human detection, and pose estimation.

Professor Joël Ouaknine has been scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken and professor at Saarland University since 2016. At the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, he leads the “Foundations of Algorithmic Verification” research group. He was appointed ACM fellow for his contributions to algorithmic analysis of dynamical systems.

Professor Thomas Lengauer already conducted research at Saarland University in the 1980s and was director at the Saarbrücken Max Planck Institute for Informatics and professor at Saarland University from 2001 until he became emeritus in 2018. At the Max Planck Institute for Informatics he led the research group on computational biology. He was appointed ACM fellow for his contributions to bioinformatics and medical informatics.

With the three new appointments, there are a total of seven ACM Fellows at the Saarland Informatics Campus. Earlier appointed fellows are: Professor Kurt Mehlhorn (appointed 1999), Professor Reinhard Wilhelm (appointed 2000), Professor Gerhard Weikum (appointed 2005), and Professor Andreas Zeller (appointed 2010). Since the inception of the Fellow program in 1994, only 19 researchers in Germany have been elected to the highest category of membership of the ACM, and now seven of them are part of Saarland Informatics Campus.

Further Information: 

Press release of the Max Planck Insitutes for Informatics and Software Systems

https://www.acm.org/media-center/2022/january/fellows-2021

https://awards.acm.org/fellows/award-winners

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
900 scientists (including 400 PhD students) and about 2100 students from more than 80 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Five world-renowned research institutes, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics and the Cluster for “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” as well as Saarland University with three departments and 24 degree programs cover the entire spectrum of computer science.

Editor:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Competence Center Computer Science
Saarland Informatics Campus
Phone: +49 681 302-70741
E-Mail: pzapf@mmci.uni-saarland.de