Head of Institute

Prof. Manfred Hauswirth has been the executive director of the Fraunhofer FOKUS since October 2014 and holds the chair of “Open Distributed Systems” at the Technische Universität Berlin. Since October 2019 Prof. Hauswirth has been co-spokesman for the field of quantum computing at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, since November 2020 he has been spokesman of Fraunhofer's competence network quantum computing and since April 2022 he has been co-spokesman for the Fraunhofer Strategic Research Field Quantum Technologies. In addition, he is member of the board of directors of the Fraunhofer Academy, from 2021 to 2025 he was spokesman of  the Fraunhofer Center for the Security of Socio-Technical Systems (Fraunhofer SIRIOS) and from 2016 to 2018 spokesman of Fraunhofer’s Berlin Center for Digital Transformation.  

He previously served as Deputy Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway, Ireland. 

In his research work, he engages particularly with distributed information systems, the internet of things, data stream processing and artificial intelligence. He has won several international awards for his work in these areas, the latest one being the “Test-of-Time Award” of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management, and is active in many scientific and political committees around digitization: He is Director at the Weizenbaum Institute, and Principle Investigator in the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF), the Berlin Big Data Center (BBDC) and the Helmholtz-Einstein International Berlin Research School in Data Science (HEIBRiDS). Manfred Hauswirth is also associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Big Data and of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), member of the IEEE Computer Society Conference Advisory Committee, partner in the Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories (WSTNet) and from 2014 to 2020 on the supervisory board of the EIT ICT Labs Germany (European Institute of Technology). In September 2024, Manfred Hauswirth was appointed to the Scientific Senate of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).

Prof. Dr. Tom Ritter has been Deputy Director of the Fraunhofer FOKUS since November 2019. Together with Manfred Hauswirth, the computer scientist is responsible for the institute's strategic orientation, key account management and customer acquisition. Since November 2024, he has also held an honorary professorship at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in the Department of Computer Science, Communication and Economics.

Tom Ritter began his career at Fraunhofer FOKUS as a student assistant and has been associated with the institute for over 20 years. Until fall 2019, he headed the SQC – Quality Engineering business unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS with its approximately 80 employees.

His main areas of interest are model-driven software engineering, the development of software tools, software development processes, infrastructures for tool integration and the consideration of quality throughout the entire development and life cycle of a system.

Since 2004, Tom Ritter has been involved with the ModelBus tool integration framework, contributed to its design and lead the ModelBus development team. Tom Ritter also participated in many standardization activities at the Object Management Group (OMG) and is co-author of books on components and services. He regularly provides his expertise in lectures and seminars as well as at conferences and workshops. Furthermore, he is a member of the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors.