Univ.-Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Ulrich Walter

Dr. Ulrich Walter, born in 1954, is a professor of aerospace engineering at the elite Technical University of Munich. After studying physics at the University of Cologne, he spent a year at the US research laboratory Argonne National Laboratories in Chicago, followed by a year as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley. From there he was appointed to the German astronaut team in 1987 and trained at the German Aerospace Center, DLR, in Cologne-Porz and at the NASA Space Center in Houston until his Shuttle Mission D-2, April 26 to May 6, 1993. In 1994 he went to the German Remote Sensing Data Center of the DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich as project manager for the major German Satellite Data Archive project. In 1998 he moved to the IBM development laboratory in Böblingen as program manager, where he was project manager and lead consultant for the development and consulting of IBM software products. His main focus is on intersatellite communication technologies and computer architectures, especially for robotics in space. He is currently working on real-time robotics and service robotics, especially robotic assistance for older people (geriatronics). As part of this, he is also working on artificial intelligence and since 2020 he has been a member of the Bavarian Ethics Council, where he is responsible, among other things, for the topic of artificial intelligence in our society.