Curiculum Vitae

Alois C. Knoll received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in Electrical/Communications Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1985 and his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, in 1988. He served on the faculty of the Computer Science department of TU Berlin until 1993, when he qualified for teaching computer science at a university (habilitation).

He joined the Faculty of Technology of the University of Bielefeld, where he was a full professor and the director of the research group Technical Informatics until 2001.

Between 2001 and 2004 he was a member of the board of directors of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems AIS, now the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS. At AIS he was head of one of the robotics research departments of that institute. That department (for educational robotics and robot construction kits) launched the successful “Roberta” Robotics Program in 2002, originally designed to motivate girls to discover robotics.

Since autumn 2001 he has been a professor of Computer Science at the Department of Informatics of the Technische Universität München. He was also on the board of directors of the Central Institute of Medical Technology at TUM (IMETUM); between April 2004 and March 2006 he was Executive Director of the former Institute of Computer Science at TUM.

His research interests include cognitive, medical and sensor-based robotics, multi-agent systems, data fusion, adaptive systems, multimedia information retrieval, model-driven development of embedded systems with applications to automotive software and electric transportation, as well as simulation systems for robotics and traffic. In these fields, he has published over 1000 technical papers and guest-edited international journals. He has participated (and has coordinated) several large scale national collaborative research projects (funded by the EU's DG Research, the DFG, the German Ministries for Economy Affairs and of Education and Research, the DAAD, the Ministry for Research of the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia).

He initiated and was the program chairman of the First IEEE/RAS Conference on Humanoid Robots (IEEE-RAS/RSJ Humanoids2000), he was general chair of IEEE Humanoids2003, general chair of Robotik in 2004 and in 2008, then the largest German conference on robotics, Program Chair of IEEE-IROS 2015, and he served on numerous other organising committees as well as editorial boards of international journals. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of the neurorobotics journal of frontiers, an open access publication for in-depth robotics articles. He is Deputy-Editor-in-Chief of Cyborg and Bionic Systems, a Science Partner Journal.

Between 2007 and 2009, he was a member of the EU’s highest advisory board for information technology, ISTAG, the Information Society Technology Advisory Group, and a member of its subgroup for Future and Emerging Technologies (FET). In this capacity, he was actively involved in developing the concept of the EU’s FET Flagship projects, and he was one of the authors of the original FET-Flagship report.

In 2009, he co-founded fortiss, the Munich Software and Systems Institute, which is a large-scale joint operation by the state of Bavaria, TUM and Fraunhofer-Society. This research institute organizes joint research and bi-directional knowledge transfer between TUM’s Informatics department and the local as well as national industry.

Prof. Knoll has always had a profound interest in teaching and supervising students at all levels. Most notably, with the support of German industry, he started TUM’s Graduate School of Information Science in Health (GSISH), which brought together students of medicine and informatics in research-oriented projects, and which hosted more than 40 PhD students (one of the founding pillars of today's Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering). He was also the host of the “Rudolf Diesel Reloaded Focus Group: Innotruck” at TUM’s Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS).

In 2010 he started Robotics, Cognition and Intelligence, a course of study, which has developed into one of the most successful MSc programs at TUM.

Since the beginning of his scientific career, he has been interested in the interaction and cross-fertilisation between the disciplines of computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. Between 2002 and 2006, he was the coordinator of the EU project neuro-it.net, which brought together over 200 researchers in a network of excellence. This network organised some very remarkable scientific events and produced a comprehensive roadmap for the development of neuro-IT. A follow-up project was NeuroVers-IT, which focused on the training of neuroscience researchers. The results of both projects inspired parts of the FET-Flagship report mentioned above.

Following this interest, he was the leader of the Neurorobotics Neurorobotics, section of the EU Human Brain Project, one of the first two EU ICT Flagships with the largest funding ever in the EU Research DG, from 2010 to 2023. He was also part of the pilot (preparatory) phase of the HBP, the outcome of which was the comprehensive HBP report to the European Commission on the state of the field in 2012.

Between 2013 and 2018 he was the coordinator of the EU-Project ECHORD++, a large EU initiative for bringing together robotics industry, research institutes and universities with the aim of advancing new robot technologies to market-readiness. He launched its predecessor, ECHORD, an EU initiative of almost identical size, in 2009.

He has been a Scientific Advisor and Program Principal Investigator for TUM-CREATE, a joint undertaking between the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore NTU and TUM-Asia, supported by TUM, and funded by Singapore's National Research Foundation NRF. His focus there was work on Electric Transportation in Megacities, especially on Modelling, Simulation and Optimisation for Architectures and Infrastructure with an emphasis on both methodology development including, but not limited to, the simulation engines SEMSim, developed in TUM-CREATE Phase 1 and CityMoS in Phase 2.  He was also a visiting professor at NTU between 2017 and 2022.

In 1990 he received the Carl-Ramsauer-Prize for his PhD thesis.

In 2010, Prof. Knoll was appointed a Fellow of the University of Tokyo, Japan.

He is a member of the Münchner Kreis and a member of the board of trustees of the Deutsches Museum.

He is a member of the German Society for Computer Science (Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)) and a Fellow of the IEEE.