Laudatio held by the promotor of the Technical Department of Linköping University (Sweden), Prof. Ove Wigertz
A Student Marshall, Prof. Wahlster and Prof. Sandewall
The degree of Doctor Honoris Causa has been awarded to Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster (Director of DFKI, the German Research Center for AI) by the Institute of Technology at Linkoeping University, Sweden. After his lecture entitled "Language Engineering: Integrating Statistical and Symbolic Methods for Spoken Dialog Systems" he received the traditional pleated hat, a golden ring and the diploma during a conferment ceremony on June 6th, 1998. The previous foreign recipients of this honorary degree were Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper and Prof. John McCarthy. The laudatio prepared by Prof. Erik Sandewall highlighted the candidate's outstanding contributions to the areas of intelligent user interfaces, multimodal presentation planning, user modeling, and speech translation. His key role in establishing DFKI as a center of excellence for the theory and application of AI was also recognized.