Peter Wittenburg

After finishing the Diplom-Ingenieur Degree in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University Berlin in 1974 with computer science and digital signal processing as main topics, I started working as research assistant setting up a center for control computation at TUB. In 1976 I got the chance to act as head of the technical group at the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics. In 2011 I became the head of the new unit called The Language Archive that was built as a collaboration between Max-Planck-Society, Berlin-Brandenburg-Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

Activities of relevance:
- since the start of the institute setting up a competitive team of experts (the TLA group now includes about 22 highly specialized experts)
- since the start of the institute setting up experimental labs including a variety of channels (speech, intonation, gesture, eye tracking, eeg, etc.), developing a variety of analysis and digital signal processing tools including speech processing and doing simulations of speech perception behavior
- since 1988 member of the Central IT Advisory Board of the Max-Planck-Society and in 2011/12 also member of the IT Strategy Committee of the MPS
- since about 1995 setting up an archive for language resources and starting with the Language Archiving Technology tool set
- since 2000 leading roles in a variety of European (funded by the EC) and national projects (funded by MPG, DFG, BMBF, NWO) and ISO initiatives (ISO TC37/SC4)
- since 2000 responsible for the archiving and accessibility of endangered languages documented in the DOBES programm funded by the VolkswagenFoundation
- since 2009 leading the technical infrastructure work in the CLARIN research infrastructure
- since 2010 member of EC's High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data (Riding the Wave report)
- since 2011 scientific coordinator of the EUDAT data infrastructure and the DASISH SSH cluster project

Awards:
- in 2011 the Heinz Billing Award of the Max-Planck-Society for the advancement of scientific computation

Teaching:
- several years of teaching "Intelligent Systems" at the universities Münster/Steinfurt and Nijmegen