Fraunhofer Medal awarded to Prof. Jarke

During the recent meeting of Fraunhofer FIT's Board of Curators, Dr. Alexander Kurz, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Senior Vice President Personnel and Legal Affairs, presented Prof. Jarke with the medal in recognition of his outstanding services to Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

In 2000, Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke became the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, whose headquarters are located on the Fraunhofer Schloss Birlinghoven Campus in Sankt Augustin. In his position as Speaker of the Institute Center Schloss Birlinghoven he initiated and coordinated the restructuring of the former administrative units into a service organization for the campus and Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft as a whole.

While president of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (German Informatics Society), Prof. Jarke organized the Jahr der Informatik (Year of Informatics) in Germany. This nationwide series of events fostered public awareness of the achievements of the Fraunhofer Information and Communication Technology Group (ICT). In 2010, Prof. Jarke was elected chairman of the ICT Group, Europe's largest information and communication technology research organization with a staff of more than 4,000 people and an annual budget of over 220 million €.

Prof. Jarke is an internationally renowned researcher and among the German computer scientists with the highest number of international citations. He managed the turnaround of Fraunhofer FIT from an institute of GMD – Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik, which focused on basic research, to an application-oriented Fraunhofer institute with solid economic success.

As founding director of the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT), Prof. Jarke laid the foundation for the cooperation of the three institutes on the Fraunhofer Schloss Birlinghoven Campus with RWTH Aachen University, Bonn University and Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences in coordinating and conducting B-IT's international Master's programs. The international orientation of the programs has become a model for other universities. The alumni of the programs are a valuable source of talents for the local Fraunhofer institutes.

Furthermore, Prof. Jarke helped to establish Business Informatics as a research field for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft by integrating Prof. Dr. Hans Ulrich Buhl's Finance Information Management group at Augsburg University as a Fraunhofer FIT project group.