Ralf Steinmetz - Biography#
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr.h.c. Ralf Steinmetz is a full professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology as well as adjunct faculty member at the Dept. of Computer Science at the Techn. Univ. Darmstadt, Germany, since 1996.
He holds a chair position as Managing Director of the "Multimedia Communications Lab". From late 1996 until late 2001, he directed the Fraunhofer (former GMD) Integrated Publications and Information Institute IPSI. In 1999, he founded the Hessian Telemedia Technology Competence Center httc; until today there he has served as chair. From 2002 to 2004, he managed the department as its dean. Since 2010 to 2015 he has been the head of the research cluster "Future Internet"; one out of five leading comprehensive scientific networks at TU Darmstadt. Since 2015 he has been the chairman of the profile area "Internet and Digitization" at the TU Darmstadt.
Since 2013 he is the Chairman and Coordinator of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre, SFB 1053 MAKI – Multi-Mechanism-Adaption for the Future Internet.
For nearly 10 years he has served as Hessian’s advisor for information and communications technology; until 2014 as founding member he contributed to the political executive board of the Hessian program LOEWE (funding excellence in science and economy). He is a member of the Scientific Council and president of the Board of Trustees of the international research institute IMDEA Networks, Madrid, Spain. He has been awarded with a Chair of Excellence at the Univ. Carlos III de Madrid.
He is an expert in the field of adaptive seamless multimedia communications. Together with more than 30 researchers, he works towards his vision of "seamless adaptive multimedia communications". With his team, he has contributed to over 900 refereed publications. A well understood adaptiveness of seamless multimedia communications has the potential to create a future where people from all over the world may easily collaborate and communicate; this shall happen regardless of any geographical constraints and of any heterogeneity of the involved technology. His research interests cover scalable quality of service (e.g. in network engineering, communication services and service oriented architectures), adaptive content distribution networks (e.g. peer-to-peer and overlay mechanism), context aware communications (e.g. ubiquitous computing), adaptive mobile networking (e.g. of nodes and protocols for ad hoc networking), knowledge media (e.g. semantic enrichment), and serious games. At Darmstadt, he often links these research issues very closely to key issues in disaster scenarios, personal mobility, and networked future automobiles.
In 2016 he was awarded with the newly established Athene Award for Knowledge and Technology Transfer at the TU Darmstadt for his visionary and successful establishment of start-up activities. He has edited and co-authored a set of multimedia books which reflected the major issues; the initial version was the worldwide first in-depth technical book on multimedia technology. He was the editor-in-chief of ACM TOMM (2010-2015); he has served as chair, vice-chair and member of numerous program and steering committees of communications and multimedia conferences. He is a member of the GI and VDE-ITG; at the VDE-ITG he also served in the board and as vice chairman until 2014. In 2017 he was among the first three scientists being awarded a fellowship of the VDE ITG. As first German scientist, he was awarded the honors of Fellow of both, the IEEE and the ACM.
