Koenig & Bauer sets up endowed chair at Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences

Koenig & Bauer has set up a five-year endowed chair at the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences. After regular appointment proceedings, Dr. Helene Dörksen has been appointed to the chair with effect from 1st August 2019. The goal of the endowed chair is to promote development and research in the field of document authentication and classification.

The chair and its laboratory are to be hosted by the ‘Mathematics and Authentication’ section within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This interdisciplinary field embracing mathematics, algorithmics, biophotonics and chemical analysis is a highly future-oriented field of research. It places a focus on the analysis of documents of all types, for example security documents and banknotes, or similarly critical packaging – especially in the pharmaceutical industry –, as well as on the analysis of other physical objects which require authentication at given points along the value chain. Studies of the implementation technologies, such as embedded and mobile systems, and their usability are also supported.

Claus Bolza-Schünemann, president and CEO of Koenig & Bauer, and board member Dr. Andreas Pleßke congratulated the newly appointed professor in person during her visit to the group headquarters in Würzburg. “The endowed chair was a logical next step, and appropriate recognition for the academic achievements of our university partner,” said Claus Bolza-Schünemann. “For several years now, we have been developing key image analysis technologies for the group in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region, together with specialists from the university. Koenig & Bauer has been a motor of the traditional German printing industry for over 200 years, driving progress in the branch with a long list of innovative developments, also in the field of optical inspection.”

Dr. Andreas Pleßke emphasised: “The close cooperation between research and industry at the Institute of Industrial IT (inIT) of the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences is already bearing fruit. We see it as one of our strategic strengths that we are able to combine our process know-how with industrial IT solutions in order to develop new approaches and fields of business. And I am especially pleased about the appointment of Prof. Dörksen – after all, the proportion of female pacemakers in our industry is still rather small.”