Über den Fachbereich Informatik

The Computer Science department has been founded by the University of Kaiserslautern on request of the Electrical Engineering and Mathematics departments in 1975. Since that time, it grew continuously and is now one of the biggest departments of the university.

Elite Research

The department has a reputation in research as well as in education. There are more than twenty research groups covering much of the entire spectrum of research topics in computer science. Currently, 21 research groups which are all headed by a professor or assistant professor do research on several topics.

In its first 20 years, the aim of the department has been the constant widening of topics in research and education. However, due to the recently growing competition in research and education on the one hand as well as the retirement of professors on the other hand, the department is currently in a strong change. This change is expressed by a long-term reform process regarding the study programs (see below) and a paradigm shift in research. Nowadays, it is necessary to focus on special topics in order to achieve top research results. The department therefore now focuses particularly on the following three hot topics:

Information and Communication Systems
System and Software Engineering
Knowledge-based and Multimedia Systems.

This concentration has also had consequences when appointing new professors. The department always seeks to strengthen its traditional view on the computer science discipline: engineering complex information processing systems together with practical experience orientation based on sound fundamentals.

Research Centers

Research activities of several groups – partly from other departments – are combined to broader topics funded by research centers of the university. In those research centers, the department achieves top-grade results on an international level. An example of interdisciplinary research centers is the „Research Center for Ambient Intelligence (AmI)” which comprises three computer science groups together with groups from electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and social sciences including sports.

In the area of basic research, special research projects funded by the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), called “Sonderforschungsbereiche” (SFB), are very prestigious and reflect the excellence of the research institute. SFBs are long-term research projects and are typically funded from nine to twelve years. Up to now, our department has been involved in three SFBs.

SFB 124: VLSI Design Methods and Parallelism
(together with the University of Saarbrücken) (1983 - 1997)
SFB 314: Artificial Intelligence
(together with the universities of Karlsruhe and Saarbrücken)
(1985 - 1995).
SFB 501: Development of Large Systems with Generic Methods
(1995 - 2003).

The excellence of the department in basic and applied research is also reflected by the following five renowned institutes and research centers. They all had been originated by the Computer Science department.

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
International Research and Training Group (“Graduiertenkolleg”) for Visualization of Large and Unstructured Data Sets
Excellence-Cluster of the state Rhineland-Palatinate
(jointly with the Mathematics department).

The most active professor in applying all mentioned research projects and institutes was Prof. J. Nehmer who is now the first senior research professor of the state Rhineland-Palatinate. This outstanding position shows his merits for the university.

Teaching Offer

After approximately 20 years of experience in the study program “Computer Science” with a “Diplom” degree that was similar to the study programs of all other German universities, we started a large reform program in the 1990’s. We first designed an interdisciplinary study program “Technoinformatik” that equally comprises computer science and electrical engineering topics. Later on we set-up a further interdisciplinary study program “Angewandte Informatik” with more importance on computer science but extended choice among possible application areas. This study program was one of the first German programs with a credit point system. Experiences with that program were very helpful when exchanging all three Diplom programs by BSc/MSc programs in 2005. Since 2003 our department also provides a PhD program that is similar to the PhD programs at top US universities. These programs together with further teaching activities lead to the following teaching offer:

B.Sc. program „Informatik“ (in German only)
International consecutive M.Sc. program „Computer Science“
International non-consecutive M.Sc. program „Applied Computer Science“
Erasmus Mundus program “European Master in Software Engineering”
Distance education MSc program “Software Engineering for Embedded Systemes”
PhD Program in Computer Science
Study programs for teacher training regarding all types of schools.

In summary, all efforts mentioned above made the University of Kaiserslautern into the leading Rhineland-Palatinate computer science location and the Computer Science Department to the core cell of the “IT site Kaiserslautern”. The faculty is hard working to continue the successes even in an increasing competition environment.

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