Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alois Knoll

Academic Career and Research Areas

Prof. Alois C. Knoll is a German computer scientist and has been a full professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich (now the School of Computation, Information and Technology) since 2001. He teaches and researches in the fields of autonomous systems, robotics and artificial intelligence.

He received his diploma in electrical engineering/communications technology from the University of Stuttgart in 1985 and completed his doctorate in computer science at the Technical University of Berlin in 1988.He then worked as a research assistant at the Department of Computer Science at TU Berlin, where he habilitated in this subject in 1993.He then moved to the Faculty of Engineering at Bielefeld University in 1993, where he worked as a full professor and head of the Computer Engineering research group until 2001. From 2001 to 2004, he was also a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems AIS of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and head of one of the institute's robotics research departments. From 2007 to 2009, he was a member of the EU's highest advisory body for information technology, ISTAG. In this role, he was involved in the development of the EU flagship projects and was one of the authors of the report "European Challenges and Flagships 2020 and Beyond".In 2009, he co-founded "fortiss", the Munich Institute for Software and Systems, which, due to its success, is now the State Institute for Information Technology of the Free State of Bavaria.  He led the EU projects ECHORD/ECHORD++ (2009 - 2018), a major initiative with the aim of bringing new robot technology to market maturity. He was also head of the "Neurorobotics" sub-project of the Human Brain Project (HBP, 2013 - 2023). Prof. Knoll is author or co-author of over 1000 scientific articles, and he was/is editor or co-editor of international journals. He has supervised countless diploma and master's theses and over 100 doctoral theses.

Awards

• Fellow, IEEE
• Visiting Professor, NTU Singapore (2017 - 2021)
• Fellow, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (2010)
• Several Best Paper Awards
• Carl-Ramsauer-Prize for the best PhD Thesis in Computer Science (1990)