The 5th International LSDMA Symposium on “The Challenge of Big Data in Science” will be held at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany, on October 5th, 2016. The program includes presentations from several internationally renowned speakers.

The full program as well as registration and travel information and  can be found on the symposium homepage.
 

At the annual meeting of the KIT Energy Center, the EnBW Foundation awarded Professor Hartmut Schmeck with the Heinrich Hertz Prize 2016 for his outstanding achievements in the field of Energy Informatics. In particular, the award recognizes Professor Schmeck's contributions to the development and deployment of innovative information and communication technologies in intelligent energy management systems.

The DGR Days 2016, an event of the German Robotics Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Robotik, DGR),  will be held on June 29-30 2016, in conjuction with RoboCup 2016, in Leipzig. The goal is to create a forum for academic exchange and foster a visible and interdisciplinary robotics community in Germany. A DGR Round Table will complement the program on June 30 - July 1, 2016.

The 19th International Conference on Information Fusion will be held on July 5-8, 2016 in Heidelberg, Germany. General Co-Chairs are professor Uwe D. Hanebeck, KIT, and Dr. Wolfgang Koch, Fraunhofer FKIE.

Starting from the winter semester 2016/2017 the KIT Department of Informatics will offer a new degree program as part of its teacher training program (German Lehramtstudium). The new course of studies aims at training qualified teaching staff for computer science education in schools.
An information event on April 22, 2016 will be held at the KIT Department of Informatics to present the new course of studies to teachers and all interested participants.  

KCIST members Prof. J. Beyerer and Prof. F. Puente León published a standard work on Machine Vision. The book offers a thorough introduction to machine vision and covers systematically all relevant components of most automated visual inspection and image processing systems.

Energy provisioning systems have to cope with fluctuating supply and flexible demands. Goal of the new Graduate School “Energy Status Data - Informatics Methods for its Collection, Analysis and Exploitation” is the optimization of energy supply, through a structured collection, storage and analysis of large amounts of energy status data. Spokesperson is Professor Klemens Böhm, Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization (IPD). The Graduate School will start on May 1st, 2016.

Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have set ambitious targets for increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emission and enlarging the share of renewable energy sources. Energy Informatics is developing the IT-based solutions required for achieving these targets. Fostering the transfer in this area between academia, industry and service providers was a major goal of the 4th D-A-CH Energieinformatik Conference, chaired by Professor Hartmut Schmeck (AIFB) and held in Karlsruhe on November 12-13, 2015.

The SPP 1835 will design and implement methods for the cooperation among different interacting traffic participants, with the aim of enhancing the safety, reducing the environmental impact and the use of resources, improving the traffic flow as well as enabling a "life-long mobility for all". Coordinator of the SPP 1835 is  Professor Christoph Stiller, Institut für Mess- und Regelungstechnik (MRT). 

Flexibility is a major requirements for future energy provisioning systems that will have to cope with both fluctuating demands and dithering supply.  Experts from academia, in particular from KIT-AIFB and FZI, and industry discussed recent developments in the area at the 31th AIK-Symposium "Smart Energy" on October 23rd, 2015.

October 11th 2015 - Maribel Acosta of the group Web Science and Knowledge Management (Prof. Studer / Prof. Sure-Vetter) won the Best Student Paper Award at the 8th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-Cap), Palisades, USA, 2015 with the paper "HARE: A Hybrid Engine to Query Answers via Crowdsourcing".

Media art is often so space consuming that it can hardly be exhibited permanently. The cooperation between ISAS and ZAK „e-Installation – Virtual experience-room for media art" (German: "Virtueller Erlebnisraum für Medienkunst") aims at preserving works of media art for future generations by means of telepresence.

The project was awarded on September 23, 2015 as "Distiguished location 2015" by the initiave "Germany - Land of ideas" .

Prof. Heinz Wörn, Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, received on March 18, 2015 from the Ufa State Aviation Technical University, Russia, the honorary doctorate degree, for his long-standing commitment to the German-Russian cooperation in the area of robotics and automation.

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) approved the proposal “Continuous Learning in International Collaborative Studies” (CLICS), which provides the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT) with a four years support. CLICS will develop three international Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in the areas of automatic speech recognition, machine translation and robotics.  To facilitate international access to the MOOCs automatic transcription and translation technology will be used.

In January 2015 Federal President Joachim Gauck appointed Prof. Dorothea Wagner, Institute of Theoretical Informatics (ITI), to serve for three years in the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat).

On January 28-29, 2015 the FZI Research Center for Information Technology celebrated its 30th anniversary by organizing the congress “30 Years of Knowledge Transfer” with presentations on key topics like security, mobility, health care, industry 4.0, logistics, robotics, and energy. An Open House event rounded the program.

Prof. Jörg Henkel (Chair for Embedded Systems) has been elevated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2015, for his "contributions to hardware/software codesign of embedded computing systems". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

Prof. Alexander Waibel  (Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics) has been elevated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2015, for his "contributions to neural network based speech recognition and translation and multimodal interfaces". IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

On November 27-28, 2014, the Forum Bildverarbeitung 2014, an international forum on image processing, will take place in Regensburg. The event is organized for the third time by the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (IIIT) at KIT together with the VDI/VDE-Gesellschaft Mess- und Automatisierungstechnik and Fraunhofer IOSB.

A joint cooperation between KASTEL and the Wibu-Systems AG was awarded on October 23, 2014, with the first prize of the 5th German IT Security Prize of the Horst Görtz Foundation for their Blurry Box® method for software protection.

KIT press release

The results of a cooperation between the research group High Performance Humanoid Technologie (H²T) at KIT and the Takanishi Laboratory, Waseda University (Japan) were awarded with a best paper award on the "International Conference on Social Robotics": "A Novel Culture-Dependent Gesture Selection System for a Humanoid Performing Greeting Interaction", G. Trovato, M. Do, M. Kuramochi, M. Zecca, Ö. Terlemez, T. Asfour, A. Takanishi.

Professor Joachim Milberg, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BMW AG, visited on October 22, 2014, the Institut for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR).

The Paper Z. Al-Halah, L. Rybok, R. Stiefelhagen, "What to Transfer - High-Level Semantics in Transfer Metric Learning for Action Similiarity" won the IBM Best Student Paper Award in the category „Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning“ at the 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2014).

Since July 1, 2014 Prof. Puente serves together with Prof. Zagar (Uni Linz) as Editor-in-Chief of the renowned journal  Technisches Messen  (TM - Technical Measurement), a professional journal addressing the entire spectrum of  application-based industrial measurement technology.