Christoph Meinel (Univ.-Prof., Dr.rer.nat., Dr.sc.nat.,
1954) was CEO and scientific director of Hasso-Plattner
Institut für Digital Engineering gGmbH (HPI) at the
University of Potsdam from 2004 to 2023. He is professor
emeritus (C4) of computer science at the HPI and the
University of Potsdam, where he holds the chair for
"Internet Technologies and Systems."
Meinel has been a member of acatech, the National
Academy of Science and Engineering, since 2012, was
chairman of the German IPv6 Council and a member of WG 2
of the National IT Summit. He is chairman or member of
numerous scientific committees, advisory boards and
supervisory boards as well as visiting professor at
various universities in China (TU Beijing, Nanjing,
Shanghai). In 2019, he was inducted into the New
Internet IPv6 Hall of Fame.
With his team, he developed and built the first European
MOOC learning platform openHPI, which is also used by
partners such as WHO (openWHO.org), SAP (openSAP.com) or
the Stifterverband (KI-Campus.org). MOOCs are
interactive online courses for thousands of learners who
can network and exchange ideas while learning. Across
all platform instances, the course offering has over 16
million enrollments.
From 2017 to 2021, as part of a pilot project funded by
the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
(BMBF), the HPI Schul-Cloud was developed under his
leadership as a secure and privacy-compliant IT
infrastructure for schools. This infrastructure enables
students and teachers to flexibly access modern digital
teaching and learning content and all digital tools
necessary for teaching via various end devices such as
computers, tablets or smartphones, and to work together
collaboratively and across schools.
Meinel has taught in HPI's bachelor's and master's
degree programs in IT systems engineering, offers
numerous interactive online courses on openHPI.de,
supervises many doctoral projects - 74 of his doctoral
students have already successfully defended their
dissertations - and is a teacher at the HPI School of
Design Thinking. From 2008 to 2022, he was program
director of the HPI-Stanford Design Thinking Research
Program together with Larry Leifer.
Meinel's research interests in the area of Internet
technologies and information security focus on the
following topics:
• "Security Engineering" - protective measures at all
levels: from IT-technical basics to attack detection and
user awareness,
• "Sustainable Artificial Intelligence" - deep learning
with low-energy artificial neural networks, and
• "Digital Education" - implementing the digital
university vision for learning in the 21st century.
He is also academically active in the field of
• Innovation research around design thinking.
Earlier work focused on complexity theory and efficient
algorithms and data structures.
Meinel is author or co-author of 25 books and monographs
and editor of several conference proceedings and
anthologies. He has published more than 750
(peer-reviewed) scientific papers in prestigious
scientific journals and at international conferences.
Meinel studied mathematics and computer science at the
Humboldt University in Berlin from 1974 to 1979, earning
his Dr.rer.nat. degree there in 1981. In 1988 he
habilitated as Dr.sc.nat. at the Institute of
Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. In
1992 he was appointed full professor (C4) of computer
science at the University of Trier. In the years 1998 to
2002, in addition to his professorship, he was also
director and managing director of the Institut für
Telematik e.V. From 1996 to 2007, Christoph Meinel was a
member of the scientific board of directors of IBFI
Schloss Dagstuhl. From 1992 to 2007, he was the
spokesman for the "Complexity" specialist group of the
German Informatics Society (GI). He has received
numerous calls in Germany and abroad, is involved in a
number of international program committees, has
organized various international symposia and
conferences, and was and is a member of a number of
supervisory boards, e.g. the Security Advisory Board of
SAP.
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