Dr. Herbert Weber is a chair professor emeritus in Informatics of the Technical University of Berlin as well as founder and director emeritus of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering with locations in Berlin and Dortmund, Germany.

In his academic research he engaged himself in the development and use of formal techniques like algebraic specifications and Petri nets for the modelling and specification of software systems as well as semi-formal techniques for the modelling of data and information. In his applied research he coined the terms:

• Continuous Engineering to cope with changing requirements and technologies in the development and operation of IT infrastructures in their respective use environment;
• Information Logistics to cope with the growing floods of information in networked application environments by establishing formalized regimes for the distribution of information to the right recipient, at the right time and place;
• Profiling of IT to cope with the complexity of IT infrastructures of industrial size in the absence of proper documentation and/or specification of systems and their interactions.

His current research is on the FUTURENET that is meant to better cope with the growing floods of information in networked organizations by means of embedded intelligence to enable smarter services for different applications like healthcare, business process management, and corporate communication management in the context of the German flagship project THESEUS.

In his capacity as the director of the Fraunhofer Institute he acted as a mediator between research and industry, in government sponsored activities, in industry initiatives, in domestic and foreign projects, and in the conceptualization of technology development and transfer policies.

He initiated and supported numerous technology transfer initiatives and projects on behalf of and with many industrial companies in Europe and the USA.

In his activities outside the academic environment Prof. Weber has been

• Chief Information and Communication Technology Advisor to the state government of North Rhine-Westfalia in Germany;
• IT Consultant and board member to a number of corporations in Germany and abroad.

He received a diploma-degree and a PhD in Numerical Mathematics and Applied Physics from the Technical University of Berlin in 1967 and 1970, respectively. Since then he has been affiliated with the Technical University of Berlin as an Assistant Professor, as a Visiting Assistant Professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with IBM Research in San José, with the Hahn-Meitner-Institut in Berlin, as a full professor with the University of Bremen in 1980 and with the University of Dortmund in 1984. In 1978 he taught as a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Texas in Austin and in 1979 as a Visiting Professor at INRIA, France.

During his career he conducted research on communication-based systems, data management systems, software engineering and software development environments. In his various affiliations in the US and in Europe he has been working mostly in software engineering, on the development of database systems and distributed data management systems. He has published a large number of papers on his work and presented his research results in many lectures in Europe, the United States and Japan.

He has actively participated in the organization of a large number of international conferences, was General Chairman of the 4th International Conference on Very Large Databases and General Chairman of the 7th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. He was a member of the editorial board for the IEEE-CS Transaction on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering and IEEE Computer and served the IEEE Computer Society as a member of the governing board. He carries the most prestigious IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Member award.