On June 25, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Patrick Mäder was appointed university professor and head of the Group of Data-intensive Systems and Visualization at the Department of Computer Science and Automation. With the establishment of the new department, TU Ilmenau is consolidating and strengthening its profile in the future field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Professor Mäder previously accompanied the junior professor software engineering for safety-critical systems at the TU Ilmenau and is internationally renowned through numerous, often interdisciplinary, collaborations and publications.
After his studies at the TU Ilmenau, he worked as a consultant and software developer in projects of various automotive manufacturers and suppliers. In 2005 Patrick Mäder started his doctoral studies at the TU Ilmenau and worked on the continuous traceability of software developments. He was awarded the Thuringian STIFT Prize for his dissertation.
From 2010, Patrick Mäder conducted research as a Lise Meitner Fellow at the Johannes Kepler University Linz at the Institute of Software Systems Engineering. In 2012, he returned to TU Ilmenau and acquired, processed and coordinated numerous third-party funded projects in the areas of software engineering and machine learning. During this time, he spent various research stays of several months at DePaul University Chicago. Since 2016, he was an assistant professor of the Endowed Chair of Software Engineering for Safety-Critical Systems at the Department of Computer Science and Automation and expanded it to a department with 18 research associates at last count. His research is devoted to topics in secure and reliable software; scalable, multi-modal, and explainable machine learning; and computational biology and ecology. In 2020, he and the project team were awarded the Thuringian Research Prize in the category of applied research for the development of an app-based solution for identifying native plants, "Flora Incognita".