Dirk Hecker Author

​Dr. Gerhard Paaß is a Lead Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS). With a background in Mathematics, he is a recognized expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the area of Natural Language Processing. Dr. Paaß has previously worked at UC Berkeley in California and the University of Technology in Brisbane. He has served as reviewer and conference chair at various international conferences, including NeurIPS, CIKM, ECML/PKDD, ICDM, and KDD, where he regularly is a member of the program committee. Dr. Paaß has received a “best paper” award on probabilistic logic, is the author of about 70 publications for international conferences and journals and he is co-author of the best-selling Open Access book “Foundation Models for Natural Language Processing” (Springer, 2023). He is currently involved in the creation of a computer center for Foundation Models. Besides experimental researchon Foundation Models, he holds lectures for Deep Learning and Natural Language Understanding at the University of Bonn and in industry. 
Dr. Dirk Hecker is deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and managing director of the Fraunhofer Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Alliance, the largest alliance of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft with more than 30 member institutes. In addition, Dr. Hecker is a member of the board of directors of the Fraunhofer Academy, which is a further education institution of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft aimed at specialists and executives of technology-driven companies. Dr. Hecker has many years of experience in leading research and industrial projects in the field of data mining and Machine Learning. His current work focuses on Big Data Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Deep Learning and Explainable AI. He studied geo-informatics at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn and received his PhD from the University of Cologne. Dr. Hecker is the author of numerous publications in the above-mentioned fields and is active as a subject matter expert and auditor on the topic of Artificial Intelligence in a wide variety of committees.