Prof. Dr. Thomas Runkler
Career
Professor Runkler studied electrical engineering at TU Darmstadt from 1987 to 1992 and received his PhD in 1995 from the same university with a thesis on uncertainty in rule based systems in information and automation technology. He was supported by the German National Academic Foundation, the Siemens Student Program, the Siemens PhD Program and the Siemens Graduate Program. Between 1996 and 1997 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of West Florida where he worked on unsupervised machine learning with Professor Bezdek. In 2001 he acquired his postdoctoral teaching qualification (habilitation) from TUM for his work on data mining. Since 1997 he has been working in industrial research and development at Siemens Corporate Technology in various functional and managerial roles, since 2008 as a senior manager. His research and teaching activities focus on machine learning, data analysis, optimization, complex systems and self-organization. Professor Runkler serves on various scientific boards, for example he is speaker of the fuzzy systems and soft computing special interest group of the German Computer Science Society (GI).