Darmstadt, 15 February 2018. Prof. Dr. Klara Nahrstedt and Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Dahmen have been awarded the Robert Piloty Prize 2018 of the TU Darmstadt for their many years of outstanding research and development work. The internationally renowned personalities each received a representative Robert Piloty medal and prize money of 5,000 euros.

Prof. Dr. Klara Nahrstedt is awarded the Robert Piloty Prize for her important scientific achievements in the development of multimedia systems and networks. Her contributions accelerated the first use of telepresence systems in telemedicine and distance learning. The prizewinner researches and teaches as computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). She is a member of the Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) in Germany and belongs to the Excellence Commission appointed by the Joint Science Conference of the German Federal Government and the Länder. Since 2008 Klara Nahrstedt has been a Fellow of the IEEE, the global Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2012 the researcher received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award “for pioneering contributions to end-to-end quality of service and resource management in wired and wireless networks”. In the same year she was honoured as a fellow of the ACM for her “contributions to quality-of-service management for distributed multimedia systems”. The scientist has been closely associated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Department of Computer Science at the TU Darmstadt for many years, including as project manager in the Collaborative Research Centre 1053 (MAKI) of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Dahmen receives the award for his outstanding basic research on constructive approximation theory, which led to new applications in computer-aided geometry, and for his pioneering contributions to adaptive multiscale methods for operator equations and variation problems. The complexity and convergence results on new algorithms, which he achieved in various international collaborations, initiated numerous scientific advances. Since 1981 Dahmen has taught and researched as a mathematics professor at several German universities, for example from 1992 to 2017 at the RWTH Aachen University. In 2002 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) in Germany and of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences. Since 2005 Wolfgang Dahmen has been working as International Research Director at the Interdisciplinary Mathematics Institute of the University of South Carolina (USA) on the topics of imaging, mathematical learning and compressed sensing. He has also held the Williams-Hedberg-Hedberg Endowed Chair of Mathematics at the University since 2017.

The Robert Piloty Prize is awarded by the TU Darmstadt every two years. It honours outstanding achievements and exceptional research and development work in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, information technology and mathematics. It is endowed with a total of 10,000 euros and a medal. With a view to Robert Piloty's work, in the field of electrical engineering and information technology the prize is preferably awarded for work in the area of data technology, in mathematics the focus is on work in the area of applied mathematics.

Prof. Dr.-Ing Robert Piloty (1924-2013) is considered an internationally recognized pioneer in the research and development of program-controlled computer systems. He was appointed to the TH Darmstadt in 1964 and founded the Institute for Communications Processing at the former Faculty of Electrical Engineering (today the Institute for Data Technology of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology). He was significantly involved in the development of computer science as an independent discipline in Germany and at the TU Darmstadt. In 1990, the award-winning scientist became emeritus professor.