Professor Dr.-Ing. Stefan Jähnichen
Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST and the Research Group on Software Engineering at the Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the TU Berlin
Born in 1947, Stefan Jähnichen took his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin in 1979. Since 1991 he has been Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST (GMD FIRST up to 2001) and the Research Group on Software Engineering at the Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the TU Berlin.
In 2008 he was elected President of the Gesellschaft für Informatik for a two year period. Apart from numerous appointments on advisory boards and expert committees, he is also on the management board of the Daimler Center for Automotive IT Innovations (DCAITI) and on the Supervisory Board of the Research Center for Information Technology (FZI) in Karlsruhe. He is a member of the Computer Science Review Board of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and a member of the Supervisory Board of the European Center for Information and Communication Technologies (EICT) GmbH.
Author of numerous books, he has also contributed some 100 papers to conference proceedings and learned journals. In his role as advisor, he has thus far supervised 65 doctorates and 5 habilitations.
Current research topics
Stefan Jähnichen has been engaged in software development research for over 20 years. His special concern is methods and tools for quality assurance across the development lifecycles of technical systems with a high ratio of software components – what are known as “embedded systems”.
Egg in an egg box:
Embedded systems are like the yolk of the egg – the richest and most vital part of the system. These tiny integrated computers now control and monitor nearly every kind of technical device. Prof. Jähnichen and his team of scientists at FIRST are working to make these electronic systems fully reliable helpers in our everyday lives.
Embedded systems can be found in almost all kinds of technical devices. They control, regulate or monitor the system in which they are integrated. They have to work perfectly over long periods of time and must be failsafe.
With his team at Fraunhofer FIRST Jähnichen is a partner in the joint research project on Software Platform Embedded Systems – known as SPES 2020 for short – which is funded by the BMBF over the next three years to the tune of 20 million Euro.
His other research interests lie in error-tolerance of complex software systems, and the modeling and simulation of complex technical systems and processes. Under the directorship of Jähnichen FIRST, in partnership with the TU Berlin and the Charité hospital, created the first functional Brain-Computer Interface based on EEG signal analysis. To improve the usability of the BCI Jähnichen and his team are now working on gel-free EEG-caps.
Contact: Prof. Dr. Stefan Jähnichen, e-mail: stefan.jaehnichen(at)first.fraunhofer.de, tel.: +49 (0) 30 6392-1801,
www.first.fraunhofer.de