Christoph Meinel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Univ.-Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (born 14 April 1954, Meißen, Germany) is a German scientist and university professor of computer-science. He is president and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) for IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam (Germany), which is ranked among top 5 departments in computer sciences in Germany.
1974-79 Meinel studied Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the Humboldt-University Berlin were he received also his PhD degree in 1981. 1988 he defensed his State Doctorate (“Habilitation”) at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. After visiting positions at the universities of Saarbrücken and Paderborn, in 1992 he was appointed a full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Trier (Germany). In that time his research activities were concentrated in complexity theory and efficient data structures (esp. binary decision diagrams - BDDs) for chip design. In the midnineteeth he extended his research focus to Internet and Web-technologies, particularly he startet applied research and development in IT-Security and Teleteaching. In that time he founded the Institut für Telematik e.V., which was supervised by the Fraunhofer Society for applied research. There he invented technologies like Lock-Keeper and Tele-TASK. 2004, when he was appointed scientific director of the HPI he continued his research work in these fields. Meanwhile Lock-Keeper is licensed by Siemens AG and tele-TASK is regularly used for recording and Internet-broadcasting lectures of HPI and several other universities. Beside his professorship in Potsdam he is a visiting professor both at the University of Luxembourg and at the School of Computer Science of the Technical University of Beijing (China).
Meinel is author or co-author of 7 text books and monographs and of various conference proceedings. He has published more than 300 scientific papers in well-known international scientific journals and conferences. His actual research interests and activities focus on applied research and Engineering in Internet Technology and Systems, particularly in the fields Trust and security engineering, Teleteaching / E-learning and Semantic Web and Secure Telemedicine. His high-security solution Lock-Keeper is international patented and licensed by Siemens AG. In 1994 he initiated the foundation of the scientific electronic journal ECCC - Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity. He is the chief editor of ECCC as well as of the IT-Gipfelblog, an actively ongoing blog about ICT in Germany. In between 1996-2007 Meinel was member of the scientific board of the IBFI Schloß Dagstuhl and speaker of the special interest group on complexity of the German computer science society Gesellschaft für Informatik. He is also member of various other international scientific boards and program committees, and has organised several symposia and conferences. Since 2007 he is chairman of the German IPv6 Council.
