STUTTGART, Germany, Dec. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Technologien fur Zivile Sicherheit GmbH (TZS), a newly launched company using cutting-edge data analysis systems to address urban management challenges, today announced that Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster, Director and Chief Executive Officer of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and a Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany will serve as Chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board.

TZS is officially launching its business operations in Germany on the eve of the national IT Summit in Stuttgart this week. "We are very pleased that someone of Dr. Wahlster's caliber is joining our advisory board. We look forward to working with one of the world's preeminent artificial intelligence experts as we develop cutting-edge solutions to effectively manage crisis situations in complex urban environments," said Peter Liebhart, TZS' incoming CEO.

Based in Berlin, TZS' core product is a holistic and sophisticated solution that integrates, filters and analyzes data from external sensors to provide new urban management tools for both effective day to day administration of urban environments and real-time solutions and risk assessments during critical incidents.

"I am delighted and honored to be selected as the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of TZS," Dr. Wahlster said. "This new company has already created important alliances, working with its affiliate AGT International and through its joint plans with SAP Research. I have no doubt that TZS will emerge as an important player in creating new and innovative solutions to the increasing challenges of tackling public safety and security."

Dr. Wahlster is a recipient of numerous honors and awards for his research contributions in the computer sciences. In 2006, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2001, Dr. Johannes Rau, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, presented Dr. Wahlster with the German Future Prize for his work on language technology and intelligent user interfaces, Germany's highest prize for scientific and technological innovations. In 2000, he was the first artificial intelligence researcher to receive the Beckurts Award.

Mati Kochavi, Chairman of TZS said, "Dr. Wahlster's decision to join our Scientific Advisory Board is a tremendous vote of confidence in TZS' mission. Everyone at TZS will benefit from his extraordinary insights and knowledge as we apply new algorithmic tools to the challenge of providing more intelligent platforms for urban management. Dr. Wahlster's advice will play a key role as we create the next generation of these tools."

Dr. Wahlster serves on several international advisory boards in some of the world's most prestigious information technology and computer science research institutions and universities, including the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley.

In addition, Dr. Wahlster has been elected to five international academies and learned societies. In 2008, he was elected full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, founded by the revered German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He was the first German computer scientist elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 2003.

Dr. Wahlster has authored more than 170 technical papers and eight books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. His current research includes multi-modal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, ambient intelligence, embodied conversational agents, smart navigation systems, semantic web services and resource-adaptive cognitive technologies.

About Technologien fur Zivile Sicherheit GmbH (TZS)

TZS is a specialized technology company dedicated to building creative solutions to effectively and efficiently manage complex urban environments and to address the emerging challenges of European public safety. TZS aims to become the European market leader in providing fully integrated urban management and emergency response systems.

About the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Since its foundation in 1988, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, based in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrucken, Bremen and supplemented by a project office in Berlin, has become the world's leading research center in this field. The financial budget in 2009 is approx. 30 million Euros. DFKI projects cover the whole spectrum from application-oriented basic research to market- and client-oriented design of product functions. Currently more than 300 employees from 46 countries are conducting research focusing also on public security applications: information extraction from text, pictures, and videos, multimodal sensor fusion, image understanding, security robots, plan-based anomaly detection, and security certificates. More than 50 spin-off companies with more than 1,300 highly qualified jobs were founded by former DFKI employees.

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SOURCE Technologien fur Zivile Sicherheit GmbH

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