|
Dear members of IN.TUM,
this October, we’ve entered the last academic year of our department, the last academic year before
the new TUM School of Computation, Information, and Technology – CIT – will become operational.
This transition will be effective October 1st next year – exactly 30 years after Informatics at TUM had
become a department of its own. Then, just a few months after I had got my doctorate here,
Mathematics and Informatics split. Now, they join again, together with Electrical and Computer
Engineering. These thirty years have been extremely thriving and successful – for Informatics as a
discipline as well as for IN.TUM. Growth in all dimensions has been the leitmotif of our development,
interrupted only by this dot.com thing roughly 20 years ago. The 1,868 students that marked the
minimum afterwards in 2008 are hard to imagine or believe, given the more than 8,300 students we
have this winter. But also the increase of the numbers of professorships is impressive – from a bit
more than 30 nine years ago to soon almost 70.
Nine of the professors we are currently searching will work on the TUM Campus Heilbronn and form
the backbone of the topical extension of the youngest TUM campus – towards Informatics, what
else? Our “Information Engineering” bachelor, designed specifically for Heilbronn, has started
already this winter term. Despite the few weeks the application portal was open only, we have now
a class of almost 100 students, showing an internationality that even tops ours here in Garching. I
want to thank all those at IN.TUM who contributed with enthusiasm and hard work to make this all
possible. Let me mention just a few of them: Helmut Krcmar, Holger Wittges, Florian Matthes, and of
course our three “Vertretungsprofessoren” Stephan Krusche, Michael Luttenberger, and Carsten
Trinitis, who do the teaching in Heilbronn while we try to recruit our new colleagues as soon as
possible.
Well, it’s hard to write such an address without mentioning the pandemic. We are now in our
second “Corona winter” – a different one in many respects, but with similar consequences for all of
us. We were happy and lucky to be allowed to go for a bit of normality this winter term, and we will
try to continue this as long as possible. Let’s hope for a better 2022!
All the best,
Hans-Joachim Bungartz
Dean of the Department of Informatics
|
|
