Awards

Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg receives DEGA Helmholtz Medal for lifetime achievement

The Ilmenau scientist and entrepreneur, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karlheinz Brandenburg, was honored on August 16 in Vienna with the Helmholtz Medal of the German Society for Acoustics (DEGA) for his outstanding life's work in the field of acoustic signal processing. (DEGA) for his outstanding life's work in the field of acoustic signal processing, especially audio compression. The award, named after Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the leading natural scientists of the 19th century, is presented annually at the annual meeting DAGA for outstanding lifetime achievements in the field of acoustics. The awardees are determined by the board of the DEGA.

Brustbildausschnitt mit Händen, die die Medaille halten Anna-Maria Dorn/Fraunhofer IDMT

This year's award winner, Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg, is known worldwide for his scientific contributions to the development and establishment of the mp3 standard. Together with his team of developers, Karlheinz Brandenburg turned mp3 into a worldwide Fraunhofer success story in the 1990s at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen. mp3 is still considered the first audio compression standard to be used worldwide. Numerous current compression methods, such as MPEG Advanced Audio Coding AAC, are based on Brandenburg's preliminary work.

Internationally recognized and awarded research work

In 2000, Karlheinz Brandenburg moved to Ilmenau to establish the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT and to fill the chair for Electronic Media Technology at the Technische Universität Ilmenau. With his research teams at Fraunhofer IDMT and TU Ilmenau, he worked, for example, on the development of an object-based spatial audio reproduction method based on wave field synthesis and on novel psychoacoustic methods for improved spatial auditory perception. Under his scientific guidance, many successful student theses and numerous, sometimes even award-winning, dissertations were written. With his research work and the results achieved, he has set international standards. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research prizes, awards and honours for his work. He now continues his research in a committed manner as "Senior Professor" at the TU Ilmenau and founder of Brandenburg Labs GmbH.

The DEGA is a non-profit scientific association founded in 1988 and dedicated to a wide variety of topics in acoustics. The aim of the DEGA is to bring members and interested parties closer to acoustics and to promote a corresponding exchange of experience. Currently, the association has more than 1,900 members, mainly from German-speaking countries. Once a year, the DEGA organizes the annual conference DAGA together with the German Physical Society DPG, the Association of German Engineers VDI and the Information Technology Society in the Association of German Electrical Engineers ITG/VDE, for current developments in acoustics.