Department of Computer Science Celebrates 50th Anniversary

When it was founded in 1972, the Department of Computer Science at what was then called the University of Dortmund was one of the first of its kind. Today, the department is among the largest in Germany. It has provided important impetus for computer science and the internet in Germany: With the EUnet project, it operated one of the first internet service providers, and in 1986 it created the first six “.de” domains. Today, the department conducts top-class research at the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, in the Collaborative Research Center “Availability of Information through Analysis under Resource Constraints” and the new Research Center “Trustworthy Data Science and Security” of the University Alliance Ruhr, among others.

Professor Manfred Bayer, President of TU Dortmund University, highlighted the department’s contribution to the introduction of machine learning in Germany, among other things, and said: “From the beginning, the Department of Computer Science has conducted research in a field that is becoming increasingly significant for society.” In a panel discussion with Heike Marzen from Economic Development Agency Dortmund and Professor Gernot A. Fink, Dean of the Department of Computer Science, the importance of computer science for the City of Dortmund and the close collaboration in knowledge transfer also became clear. As long ago as 1980, for example, two of the department’s employees set up the IT service provider Materna in Dortmund.

Honorary doctorate for special achievements and services

For her outstanding achievements in computer science, in particular algorithm engineering, the Department of Computer Science has conferred an honorary doctorate on Professor Dorothea Wagner. She has been a professor at the Institute of Theoretical Informatics at the KIT since 2003. In her research, she focuses, among other things, on algorithms for complex networks such as route planning systems. In 2016, she was admitted to acatech, Germany’s National Academy of Science and Engineering, and in 2019 she was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal of the German Informatics Society. She has been a member of the German Science and Humanities Council since 2015 and its chair since 2020. Prior to that, she was Vice President of the German Research Foundation for eight years.

Professor Wagner thanked the department for the award and said that she had received important input from Dortmund for her research, for instance from Professor Ingo Wegener. Among other things, she reported on the beginnings of her research into route planning networks in the early 2000s and on projects in the area of social network modeling. As chair of the German Science and Humanities Council, she would like above all to advance science communication and digital transformation in the science system.

Colleagues and alumni

The laudatory speech was given by Professor Wagner’s long-standing colleague, Professor Der-Tsai Lee from the Institute of Information Science (IIS) at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, of which he was president for over ten years. In a keynote speech, Professor Joachim Buhmann from the Institute for Machine Learning at ETH Zurich explained that data science constitutes a turning point in intellectual history. Emeritus Professor Manfred Reimer, Founding Commissioner, Emeritus Professor Heinz Beilner and Hans Decker, Chair of the Alumni Association, reported on the early days of the Department of Computer Science in Dortmund.

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