Fraunhofer transportation and infrastructure research centre appoints Sanaz Mostaghim as new director

On June 1, Professor Sanaz Mostaghim took over as the new institute director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Transportation and Infrastructure Systems IVI. In this role, she is working together with Professor Matthias Klingner, the institute’s longstanding director, who will stay on as executive director until the end of the year.

Innovative mobility, smart infrastructure, bright prospects: The researchers at Fraunhofer IVI make a real impact across industries and sectors with solutions for automotive applications, smart transportation systems, and civil security. New institute director, Professor Sanaz Mostaghim, joined the institute on June 1, adding fresh, forward-looking expertise to the economically successful institute’s portfolio. A well-known expert on artificial intelligence, Mostaghim has held the Chair of Computational Intelligence at the Faculty of Computer Science at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU) since 2014. Particular areas of focus in her research include multi-objective optimization, decision-making and evolutionary algorithms along with collective intelligence and swarm robotics. Before joining the Institute for Intelligent Cooperating Systems at OVGU, Mostaghim served in other roles, including as an academic council member at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In 2014, the German Research Foundation (DFG) recognized Mostaghim — whose research projects have taken her to Swinburne University of Technology, in Melbourne, and to Yale University, among other places — with the DFG Heisenberg Professorship for Intelligent Adaptive Systems.

Professor Holger Hanselka, president of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, was very pleased with the announcement: “I’m delighted that we have been able to bring in Professor Mostaghim, a prominent researcher, to lead Fraunhofer IVI. Artificial intelligence is a huge topic of the future for our society and economy. I firmly believe that with her expertise, Professor Mostaghim will be instrumental in advancing the institute’s outstanding development and visionary research work.”

For her part, Mostaghim noted: “Transportation and infrastructure lie at the heart of the revolutionary new topics we are facing in the era of AI, digital transformation, and climate change. The research topics pursued by Fraunhofer IVI in developing key technologies in these domains play a leading role in achieving sustainable innovation for our society and economy. Fraunhofer IVI has a highly stable and successful profile, and I look forward to the chance to contribute my recent research on computational intelligence to the institute’s work. This includes AI-based optimization and decision-making, adaptive and cooperative intelligent systems, swarm intelligence, human-centered AI, and intelligent planning and process optimization.”

In her role as institute director, Mostaghim is initially working together with executive director Professor Matthias Klingner during a transitional phase.

This article was first published on June 3 by Fraunhofer.