Ralf Steinmetz

Ralf Steinmetz (born 31 July 1956 in Santiago de Chile, Chile) is a German computer scientist and electrical engineer. He is professor of multimedia communication at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

In the eighties Steinmetz coined and sharpened the term multimedia. He did fundamental work in the field of the perception of synchronicity in multimedia flows. At TU Darmstadt Steinmetz is working on realizing truly seamless multimedia communication. His research interests include communication services, IT architectures, knowledge media, mobile networking, networked gaming, network mechanisms & quality of service, peer-to-peer networking, network security & trust and ubiquitous computing.

Life Steinmetz studied electrical engineering at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt), where he received his doctorate in 1986 on the subject of modularized Petri nets for the description and analysis of telecommunication systems with meshed information-processing structures. After further activities in research and management at Philips and IBM from 1987 to 1996, Steinmetz habilitated in 1994 at the department of computer science of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University on the subject of multimedia technology and their fundamentals, components and systems. In 1996 he was appointed as professor for industrial process and system communication at TU Darmstadt. It was an endowed professorship of the Volkswagen Foundation. 1999 Award for Excellence in Internet Research from IBM 2004 National Leadership Award of the Economic Forum Germany 2014 Chair of Excellence of the Charles III University of Madrid 2019 elected member of Academia Europaea 2022 Honorary Doctor of RWTH Aachen