CRITO Faculty Associate Professor Alfred Kobsa, of the
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, Department
of Informatics, has been awarded the coveted Alexander von
Humboldt Research Award, Germany’s highest honor for
senior foreign scientists and scholars.
Conferred by the government of Germany, the research award
honors the academic achievements of the award winner’s
lifetime. Kobsa conducts research on the areas of user modeling
and personalized systems, privacy, and in information visualization.
He is the founding editor of the reputed journal User Modeling
and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization
Research. Kobsa came to UC Irvine in 2000. Prior to that he
was the Director of the Institute for Applied Information
Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for
Information Technology (GMD), and a Professor of Computer
Science at the University of Essen, Germany. For more information
about Professor Kobsa’s work, please see his website:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa.
Humboldt award winners are invited to carry out research
projects of their own choice in Germany in cooperation with
colleagues in Germany. Kobsa will work with Professor Oliver
Günther and Dr. Sarah Spiekermann, from Humboldt University,
Berlin, to jointly study privacy implications of the usage
of radio frequency identification tags in the retail industry.
He will be accepting the award next Spring in Germany.
The Humboldt Prize was re-established by the Federal Republic
of Germany in 1953 as an expression of gratitude to the United
States for its post-World War II aid under the Marshall Plan.
Awards are granted annually to scientists and scholars from
abroad with internationally recognized academic qualifications.
The prize grants the recipient twelve months of research support
in a period of five years at any German university or Max
Planck Institute. Among past winners of this prestigious prize
are 31 Nobel Laureates.
(CRITO Research Spotlight, December 2005)
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