New Director at FKIE

The Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE) has a new director: Prof. Dr. Peter Martini, director of the Institute of Computer Science 4 at the University of Bonn, was provided with the key to FKIE by his predecessor Prof. Dr. Jürgen Grosche who was the director of the former FGAN Institute for 23 years. Jürgen Grosche made FKIE what it is today: An exciting focal point of scientific activities in the areas of Command and Control, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.

Professor Martini goes for continuity. As chair of the scientific advisory council, he has been in close contact to FKIE for many years. He also was involved as an advisor in several recent crucial decisions.

Central to him and the deputy director, Prof. Dr. Christopher Schlick, the director of the Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics at the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH), is to stay a competent, reliable and unbiased partner of the German Ministry of Defense (MoD) . Project based activities will be extended significantly, but the institute will make sure that its independence from companies will not be jeopardized.

At FKIE, Peter Martini will significantly extend the activities in the area of Cyber Defense: A Cyber Defense Center with labs in Wachtberg and Bonn will be established. As a joint initiative of Fraunhofer and the University of Bonn, an additional professor and a junior professor will extend both research and teaching in the area of real-world oriented IT security / Cyber Defense.

“FKIE will not be migrated to a Cyber Defense Institute, but Cyber Defense will be an important topic at an institute covering the complete spectrum of network based command and control”, explains Martini. He goes for something like 40 people working in the area of Cyber Defense in 3 to 4 years from now. Currently FKIE has a staff of 280 people working on a wide range of topics such as wide-area reconnaissance, threat identification, distributed information systems, communication in heterogeneous networks, Human-Machine interaction and unmanned systems.