Ralf Steinmetz

From IRF 2007

Prof. Dr. Ralf Steinmetz

Since early 1996, Dr. Ralf Steinmetz has been a professor at the dept. of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology as well as at the dept. Computer Science of the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. There he is in charge of a chair position as managing director of the "Multimedia Communications Lab". From late 1996 until late 2001 he directed the Fraunhofer (former GMD) Integrated Publications and Information Institute IPSI. In 1999 he founded the Hessian Telemedia Technology Competence Center (httc e.V.). On whose board he has since served as chair. From 2002 to 2004 as dean he managed the department. His research interests cover networked multimedia issues with the vision of "seamless multimedia communications"; i.e. network dependability and security (e.g. gateways, firewalls), quality of service (e.g. network engineering), content distribution networks (e.g. streaming), context aware communications (e.g. peer-to-peer mechanisms), media semantics (e.g. ontology enrichment, metadata). At Darmstadt he relates these research issues often very closely to mobility, Internet telephony and telemedia learning. He has been the editor and co-author of a multimedia course, which reflects the major issues of the first (updated in several versions) in-depth technical book on multimedia technology. He has worked as an editor of various IEEE, ACM and other journals. He has served as chair, vice-chair and member of numerous program and steering committees of communications and multimedia workshops and conferences. He is a member of the GI and VDE-ITG. He was awarded as ICCC Governor, the honour of Fellow of both, the IEEE and the ACM. In 2005 he became member of the technology advisory board of the “Hessen Agentur” and he was appointed as the advisor for information und communications technology by the Hessian government.