Dr.-Ing. Dirk Balfanz

Dirk Balfanz graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Dortmund in 1992. He achieved the engineering doctora ldegree in 2002 with his thesis about automated generation and usage of geo-metadata.

From 1993 ‑ 1996, he worked in the area of digital wireless communication at the BOSCH Telecom company. He took part in ETSI standardisation of the DECT standard and specifically worked in the implementation of the first DECT-based phone systems at BOSCH Telecom.

In 1996, he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics as a researcher in the field of metadata technology for geographic information systems (GIS). He carried out projects in the area of geodata management and geodata retrieval and supported with his work the standardisation of the ISO 19115 geographic metadata standard.

From 2001 until 2006, he has been the head of the research department for “Mobile Information Visualization” at the Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV e.V.) in Darmstadt. As the leader of a team of computer scientists, designers and engineers, he was responsible for research and development in the area of context-sensitive multimedia data processing and visualisation, with a focus on mobile systems. He was project manager of the EU-funded project “MUMMY - mobile knowledge management” (2002‑ 2005) and “servingo - Service Platform Infotainment and Logistics for FIFA World Cup 2006” (2004-2006) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

He was also the Managing Director of the “MAP-Forum” (from 2003 until 2006), which is the legal follow-up entity of the former German research project “MAP - Multimedia Workspace of the Future”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour.

Since end of 2006 Dr. Balfanz is Head of Research at the CAS Software AG in Karlsruhe. CAS is acknowledged as the leading German company offering CRM and information management solutions for SMEs.

Dirk Balfanz is a member of the German Informatics Society (GI) and the MAP-Forum.