Prof. Dr.
Katharina Morik

The Lamarr Institute thanks its founding director Prof. Dr. Katharina Morik. As an outstanding and internationally highly renowned pioneer of Machine Learning, Katharina Morik has made a large number of fundamental research contributions that have been highly published, and has driven interdisciplinary, AI-based applications that have achieved significant economic and societal goals. She has been instrumental in establishing and continuously promoting the Machine Learning research community in Germany and Europe scientifically, structurally, and organizationally, and in her work has always been committed to science, teaching, and the promotion of young researchers and women.

Katharina Morik received her doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1981 and her habilitation from the TU Berlin in 1988. In 1991, she established the chair of Artificial Intelligence at TU Dortmund University. She retired in 2023. Professor Morik is a pioneer of bringing Machine Learning and computing architectures together so that Machine Learning models may be executed or even trained on resource-restricted devices. Starting from inductive logic programming, she worked on support vector machines (SVM) and on probabilistic graphical network models. Data analysis for sustainability has always been a focus of her research leading to Resource-Aware Machine Learning. In 2011, she acquired the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 876 “Providing Information by Resource-Constrained Data Analysis”, consisting of 12 projects and a graduate school. After the longest possible funding period of 12 years, the CRC 876 ended with the publication of 3 books on Resource-Constrained Machine Learning (De Gruyter). Katharina Morik has participated in numerous European research projects and coordinated the EU project Mining Mart, investigating the overall pipeline of Machine Learning. She was a founding member and Program Chair of the conference series IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) and is a member of the steering committee of the ECML PKDD. She chaired program committees of A and A* conferences several times and was involved in editorial boards of leading international journals. Professor Morik is a member of the Academy of Technical Sciences and of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was awarded Fellow of the German Society of Computer Science GI e.V. in 2019.

Katharina Morik initiated the establishment of the five Competence Centers for Artificial Intelligence in Germany. From 2018-2022, she was spokesperson of the Competence Center Machine Learning Rhine-Ruhr ML2R, later the Lamarr Institute, and coordinated the cooperation and activities of the Network of German Centers of Excellence for AI Research.