TU Wien Informatics

20 Years

Frank Leymann Officially Awarded Kurt Gödel Visiting Professorship

  • 2022-11-23
  • People

At this year’s Quantum Lectures, Frank Leymann and TU Wien Informatics look back on almost two years of cooperation.

Frank Leymann, Quantum Lectures 2022
Frank Leymann, Quantum Lectures 2022
Picture: Amélie Chapalain / TU Wien Informatics

On November 22, 2022, Frank Leyman was officially awarded the Kurt Gödel Visiting Professorship Certificate. Finally being able to come together on-site after all previous activities were held online, Dean of TU Wien Informatics Gerti Kappel and Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation Johannes Fröhlich handed over the certificate, looking back on almost two years of successful cooperation in research and teaching.

Frank Leymann was appointed Kurt Gödel Visiting Professor in 2021. Since then, he regularly teaches at TU Wien Informatics, and presents the public Quantum Lectures every year in November.

“With the Kurt Gödel Visiting Professorship, we are moving towards expanding our internationalization and ensuring excellence in science. We aimed to bring the best of the best to Vienna for teaching and research, and we are thrilled to have attracted one of the best quantum researchers with Frank Leymann,“ Gerti Kappel is convinced.

For TU Wien Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation Johannes Fröhlich, scientific exchange and networking between the researchers and faculties is the most important advantage of this initiative: “Sustainable cooperation partners are crucial for the up-and-coming quantum field. Several million euros of research funds are dedicated to quantum research within Quantum Austria. Congratulations to TU Wien Informatics for hosting one of the biggest names in quantum research – we are excited to launch ongoing collaborations within and beyond the faculty.”

In his lectures, Frank Leymann talked about Quantum Aspects of Topological Data Analysis and how this field evolves to show that quantum supremacy in informatics might be verifiable after all. His research colleague Johanna Barzen from the University of Stuttgart introduced the faculty to the relatively young field of Quantum Humanities and the quantum based databank tool QHAna.

About Frank Leymann

Frank Leymann, born in Bochum in 1957, studied Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy at the University of Bochum, Germany. After receiving his master’s degree in 1982, he pursued his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1984. Afterward, he joined IBM Research and Development and worked for two decades for the IBM Software Group, building database and middleware products such as tools supporting conceptual and physical database design for DB2. He built performance prediction and monitoring tools for an object database system and was co-architect of a repository system. Apart from that, he developed a universal relation system as well as a complex object database system on top of DB2. He was a co-architect of the MQSeries family.

In parallel to that, Frank worked continuously on workflow technology and created IBM’s workflow product set. As an IBM Distinguished Engineer and elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology, he contributed to the architecture and strategy of IBM’s middleware stack and IBM’s On-Demand Computing strategy (which is known as Cloud Computing today). He is a co-author of numerous Web Service specifications and standards from the Business Process Management and cloud domain. 
In 2004, Frank Leymann was appointed full professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart, where he founded the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems and is director of the same. His research interests comprise service-oriented computing and middleware, workflow- and business process management, pattern languages, cloud computing, transaction processing, integration technology, and quantum computing.

Frank is an elected member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). He published uncountable papers in journals and proceedings, co-authored four textbooks, and holds close to 60 patents, especially in the area of workflow management and transaction processing. He served on program and organization committees of many international conferences and is (associated) editor of several journals.

From 2006 to 2011, he was a member of the scientific directorate of Schloss Dagstuhl—Leibniz Center of Computer Science. In 2019, he was accepted as a Fellow at the Center of Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST).

Read more about his research endeavors and what quantum is all about in our interview with Frank Leymann.

About the Kurt Gödel Visiting Professorship

The Kurt Gödel Visiting Professorship at TU Wien Informatics was launched in 2021 with Frank Leymann being the first appointee. Within this program, we invite highly renowned scientists to further our international outreach and cooperation. This high-level exchange ensures excellence in science and lively collaboration with our visiting professors’ universities.

Kurt Gödel Visiting Professors are appointed for three years that allow them to teach and pursue research with students and scientists at TU Wien Informatics.

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