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The official award ceremony will take place on 17 September 2025 as part of the Informatik Festival 2025 in Potsdam. The DFKI has issued the following press release:
The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.
Professor Wahlster has shaped the DFKI since its foundation and, during his time as chair of the Executive Board from 1997 to 2019, developed it into one of the world's largest and most renowned AI research centres. Under his leadership, DFKI developed into a strong cooperation partner for industry. Wahlster initiated numerous flagship projects, promoted the transfer of research into commercial applications, and represented Germany internationally as an AI thought leader. He remains closely associated with DFKI as chief advisor.
Wolfgang Wahlster's scientific life's work ranges from groundbreaking basic research to successful transfer into industrial practice. He gained international recognition for his pioneering work in the fields of speech dialogue systems, multimodal human-machine interaction and interpreting systems for spontaneous speech, among other things.
GI President Christine Regitz: "Wolfgang Wahlster is not only an extraordinarily influential scientist, but also a very successful university lecturer and science manager who has had a significant impact on European AI research. In addition, he contributes his expertise to political and social debates and takes a clear stance on issues such as data ethics."
Wahlster himself says: "Receiving the GI's highest award is also a great pleasure for me because it gives artificial intelligence – my field of research in Computer Science for 50 years now – the appropriate status and recognition it deserves. I had the privilege of having several lengthy technical discussions with Konrad Zuse, one of the fathers of the computer. His early ideas on programming a chess computer particularly inspired me as a computer science student. I was also fortunate enough to be involved in shaping the birth of AI in Germany, and published my first research results on speech dialogue systems, as they are widely known today through Chat-GPT, back in 1975. After many years of scepticism towards AI among computer science colleagues and some setbacks, I can now participate in the greatest heyday of AI to date. Today, it is an integral part of our professional and private everyday life and is considered a key technology in the German government's high-tech agenda."
DFKI CEO Antonio Krüger: "On behalf of all our employees, I would like to congratulate Professor Wahlster on receiving the highest award for Computer Science in the German-speaking world. We are proud to have the first AI researcher in our ranks to be honoured with the Konrad Zuse Medal for his life's work."
In addition to his research, Wolfgang Wahlster is active in numerous renowned scientific academies. Among other things, he is a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, the Royal Swedish Nobel Academy in Stockholm, the National Academy Leopoldina, the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. As a doctoral supervisor, he has supervised 77 [doctoral] dissertations, and 22 of his former doctoral students are now professors themselves.
Since 1987, the GI has awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Computer Science.
The official presentation of the medal will take place on 17 September 2025 during the Community Dinner of the Computer Science Festival 2025 in Potsdam.
Details at: https://informatik2025.gi.de/abendveranstaltungen.html
Further information:
www.wolfgang-wahlster.de
