DFKI, with a project office in Berlin and main sites in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, and Bremen is Germany's leading innovation oriented research center in the area of intelligent software solutions. In the international scientific community DFKI is recognized as one of the most important „Centers of Excellence” for its proven ability to rapidly transfer leading edge research to commercially relevant application solutions.
DFKI was founded in 1988 as a non-profit company by renowned German IT companies and two public research organizations. Since then, DFKI GmbH has established a reputation for proactive and customer oriented work and is known both nationally and internationally as a competent and reliable partner for commercial innovation. DFKI is managed by Professor Dr.Dr.hc.mult Wolfgang Wahlster (Chairman and CEO) and Dr. Walter G. Olthoff (CFO).
Projects at DFKI are organized under one of the following research areas: Knowledge Management, Robotics Innovation Center, Safe and Secure Cognitive Systems, Innovative Retail Laboratory, Institute for Information Systems at DFKI, Agents and Simulated Reality, Augmented Vision, Language Technology, Intelligent User Interfaces, Innovative Factory Systems. Due to the short innovation cycles in IT, DFKI projects typically include the entire spectrum from basic application-based research to market and customer oriented development. At the present time, there are more than 120 ongoing projects.
DFKI is the only German Institute for Computer Science to participate in each of the three leading-edge research clusters: DFG Cluster of Excellence “Multimodal Computing and Interaction”; BMBF Leading-Edge Cluster “Software Innovations for the Digital Enterprise”; and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s (EIT) Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) for Computer Science (EIT ICT Labs).
