Prof. Dr. Helge Ritter

Helge J. Ritter studied physics and mathematics at the Universities of Bayreuth, Heidelberg and Munich and received a Ph.D. in Physics from the Technical University of Munich in 1988. Since 1985, he has been engaged in research in the field of neural networks. In 1989 he moved as a guest scientist to the Laboratory of Computer and Information Science at Helsinki University of Technology. Subsequently he was assistant research professor at the then newly established Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1990, he is professor at the Department of Information Science, University of Bielefeld. In 1995, Helge Ritter spent one year as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. His main interests are principles of neural computation, in particular self-organizing and learning systems, and their application to robot cognition, data analysis and interactive man-machine interfaces. In 1999, Helge Ritter was awarded the SEL Alcatel Research Prize and in 2001 the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation DFG. Helge Ritter is co-founder and one of the directors of the Bielefeld Institute of Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab) and coordinator of the excellence cluster "Cognitive Interaction Technology".