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

Dr. Ulrich Walter, born in 1954, is a full professor of space technology at the Technical Elite University of Munich. After studying physics at the University of Cologne, he spent a year at the US research laboratory Argonne National Laboratories, 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 moved to Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich as project manager of the major German Satellite Data Archive project at the DLR's German Remote Sensing Data Center. In 1998, he moved to the IBM development laboratory in Böblingen as Program Manager, where he was responsible for the development and consulting of IBM software products as Project Manager and Lead Consultant. His focus is on inter-satellite communication technologies and computer architectures, especially for robotics in space. He is currently working on real-time robotics and service robotics, in particular robotic assistance for the elderly (geriatronics). As part of this, he also deals with artificial intelligence and has been a member of the Bavarian Ethics Council since 2020, where he is responsible for the topic of artificial intelligence in our society, among other things.