Biography
After completing her doctorate in 1981 at the University of Hamburg on belief systems of artificial intelligence, Katharina Morik worked in the project that developed the Hamburg application-oriented natural language system HAM-ANS at the University of Hamburg. At the TU Berlin she took over the internal project management for the joint project LERNER in 1985, in which the first German knowledge acquisition system integrating machine learning was developed. After her habilitation at the TU Berlin (1988), she continued her focus on designing such a system as an assistant to the knowledge engineer (sloppy modeling) within the ESPRIT project "Machine Learning Toolbox" at the Society for Mathematics and Data Processing in St. Augustin. In 1991 she accepted the call for the C4 professorship in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dortmund.
Together with Professor Yves Kodratoff she organised the first European Summer School on Machine Learning and gave a course on this topic at ECAI. She organized the eleventh German workshop on Artificial Intelligence in 1987 and the International Workshop on Knowledge Representation and Organization in Machine Learning in the same year. In 1989 she organised the fourth "European Working Session on Learning". At the IJCAI-91 she organized together with Francesco Bergadano and Wray Buntine the workshop "Evaluating and Changing Representation in Machine Learning". In 1988 she founded the Section 1.1.3 for Machine Learning in the German Informatics Society, of which she was the spokesperson until 1993. Since the foundation of the "European Network of Excellence for Machine Learning and Related Fields" and the "European Network of Excellence for Knowledge Discovery", she has headed its committee for education and is also responsible for education and training issues in the European Coordinated Action "Ubiquitous Computing and Knowledge Discovery". In 1999, she organized the intensive course for artificial intelligence: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. In summer 2006 and spring 2008 she organised the summer school "Ubiquitous Knowledge Discovery". Together with Xindong Wu she founded the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, of which she was the program committee chair in 2004. In 2008 she co-chaired the internationally second most popular conference on machine learning and data mining, ECML/PKDD 2008, together with Bart Goethals and Walter Daelemans.
She is speaker of the SFB876, which is in its third phase and has been working at the TU Dortmund since January 2011
Together with Stefan Wrobel, Katharina Morik heads one of the 4 competence centers for machine learning, the Competence Center for Machine Learning Rhine-Ruhr (ML2R).
In Juli 2022, ML2R became the sustainably funded Lamarr-Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Katharina Morik coordinated the cooperation of the centers among themselves and with the French AI centers.
Katharina Morik is on the scientific advisory board of Rapidminer (formerly Rapid-I).
She is co-founder and member of the Scientific Council of the European Institute for Participatory Media.
From the beginning until 2022 she has led the working group "Technological Enablers" in the Platform Learning Systems (with Volker Markl).
Katharina Morik is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the German Academy of Engineering Sciences.
In 2019 she was appointed as a Fellow of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (German Informatics Society).
