Andreas Abecker, Head of Innovation Management at Disy Informationssysteme GmbH

About

Andreas Abecker studied computer science and economics at the University of Kaiserslautern (Germany), and received the Diploma (master's degree, Dipl.-Inform.) in 1994. As a freelancer, he did a study on data mining techniques for credit risk evaluation at Swiss Bank Corporation, Basel.

In February 1995, he started to work with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH ) in Kaiserslautern. In the DFKI Intelligent Engineering Systems department, he worked on knowledge representation (description logics, constraints) and knowledge evolution (theory revision, data mining) issues in the areas of technical configuration, production planning, and knowledge-based scheduling.

Since 1996, he was a member of the DFKI Knowledge Management department. As a researcher in the KnowMore project (Knowledge Management for Learning Organizations) and as project leader of the DFKI part of the European (ESPRIT) KNOWNET project (Knowledge Management with Intranet technologies), he investigated organizational, methodological, and technological issues for building Organizational Memories. Special emphasis was laid upon the integration of collaboration and coordination technologies (groupware, workflow), document management, and formal knowledge processing (ontologies and metadata for conceptual information retrieval). Since July 2000, he was the Project Director of the European R&D project DECOR (Delivery of Context-Sensitive Organizational Knowledge).

In Spring 2003, Andreas Abecker moved to the Research Center for Information Technologies (Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) – now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT – in order to take over the position of the leader of the FZI Knowledge Management team (WIM - Wissensmanagement) which is part of the FZI Information Process Engineering (IPE) department. WIM was part of a group of institutions (FZI WIM, ontoprise GmbH, and the AIFB KM group at Karlsruhe University) led by Prof. Rudi Studer doing world-wide renowned research in the area of Semantic Web and ontology-enabled applications. Within FZI, he coordinated the Competence Center Business Software (Kompetenzzentrum Unternehmenssoftware am FZI), a virtual organization constituted from the six FZI teams working on Business Processes (BPEM), Databases (DBS), Production Data and Process Management in Engineering (PDE), Program Structures (PROST), Software Technology (SWT), and Knowledge Management (WIM).

In 2004, he received a doctor’s degree in Applied Informatics (Dr. rer. pol., summa cum laude) from the University of Karlsruhe (TH), with a thesis about Business-Process Oriented Knowledge Management.

Andreas Abecker wrote and co-authored far more than 120 refereed publications in Expert Systems, Knowledge Management, Semantic Technologies, Geographic Information Science and Environmental Informatics, he initiated a workshop series on AI and Organizational Memories ( KI-97 , ECAI-98 , IJCAI-99 , ECAI-00 , IJCAI-01 ), serves as a reviewer for several journals such as IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Elsevier's Knowledge-Based Systems Journal, or Springer's Knowledge and Information Systems Journal, and gave lectures on knowledge-based systems at the University of Karlsruhe, Duale Hochschule Mosbach and Duale Hochschule Karlsruhe, as well as the Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld. In Germany as well as internationally, he pushed the development of the topics and respective research communities in Business-Process oriented Knowledge Management (2001 - …), Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management (2004 - …) and Semantics for eGovernment (2006 - …). Further, he acted as FZI’s W3C representative (ACR), co-organized the Semantic Web Akademie Karlsruhe and represented FZI in the STI International Executive Board.

With a short transition time in 2010/11 when Andreas worked both for FZI and disy, he moved to disy Informationssysteme GmbH in Karlsruhe in order to fill the newly created position of the Head of Innovation Management. Besides corporate-internal knowledge and innovation management as well as strategic business development, his duties comprise acquisition and running of research projects.

At Disy, the research topics shifted towards intelligent geo data management and analytics for application areas such as water management, environment protection, smart city, consumer protection, disaster management, infrastructure management etc.

In this position, Andreas acquired and supervised about 20 national and international joint research projects in topics such as Integrated Water Resource Management, Smart Water, AI for Disaster Management, Big Geo Data, Machine Learning for Geo Data Quality, Participatory Sensing and Citizen Science, Smart Sensor Data Management etc.

He also regularly supported the special interest group on environmental information systems within the German Society for Computer Science and was the main inventor of the first German workshop on AI for environmental informatics.

Industry experience

Education: PhD

Seniority: Manager, Director, Professor

Years of experience: 20 years or above

Work experience

Taxonomy