Europe’s oldest innovation award was presented by the spokesperson of the Rudolf Diesel Board of Trustees, Professor Alexander Wurzer, in the presence of around one hundred invited guests from science, business and politics. The Diesel Board of Trustees, which acts as the selection committee, consists of around sixty technology executives from world-leading, medium-sized technology companies. 

With this year’s award, the German Institute for Inventions honours the life’s work of Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster, who has been a pioneer and bridge builder between AI research and industrial application for more than four decades. Wahlster was appointed to Germany’s first chair of artificial intelligence at Saarland University in 1982 at the age of just 29. His work on speech understanding, translation systems and dialogue technologies laid the foundation for today’s voice assistants and chatbots at an early stage. As a thought leader in Industry 4.0, he not only coined the term in 2010, but also designed central concepts for the fourth industrial revolution – with global impact. 

In her laudatory speech, Dr Diana Taubert, Managing Director of ETL IP Patentanwaltsgesellschaft mbH, praised Wahlster’s extraordinary role in the German innovation landscape: ‘You are not only a pioneer of artificial intelligence – you are also an architect of innovation structures, a bridge builder between research and application, a facilitator in the best sense of the word.’ She emphasised that Prof. Wahlster has not only played a key role in shaping technological developments, but also ethical and normative standards – in ethics commissions, standardisation committees and public debates. 

Since its introduction in 1953, the Rudolf Diesel Medal has been awarded to outstanding personalities from the IT world such as Konrad Zuse, Wolfgang Giloi, Andreas Grünberg, Hasso Plattner, Renate Pilz and August-Wilhelm Scheer. With Wolfgang Wahlster, one of the most influential personalities in European AI research joins this circle. 

As President of the GDNÄ (2017-2018), Professor Wahlster organised the 130th meeting of the Society of Natural Scientists in Saarbrücken, entitled ‘Digitalisation of the Sciences’. He later served on the GDNÄ’s Executive Board for several years.