Helge J. Ritter studied physics and mathematics at the Universities of Bayreuth, Heidelberg and Munich and received a Ph.D. in Physics from the Technical University of Munich in 1988. Since 1985, he has been engaged in research in the field of neural networks. In 1989 he moved as a guest scientist to the Laboratory of Computer and Information Science at Helsinki University of Technology. Subsequently he was assistant research professor at the then newly established Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1990, he is professor at the Department of Information Science, University of Bielefeld. In 1995, Helge Ritter spent one year as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. His main interests are principles of neural computation, in particular self-organizing and learning systems, and their application to robot cognition, data analysis and interactive man-machine interfaces. In 1999, Helge Ritter was awarded the SEL Alcatel Research Prize and in 2001 the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation DFG. Helge Ritter is co-founder and one of the directors of the Bielefeld Institute of Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab) and coordinator of the excellence cluster "Cognitive Interaction Technology".

Selected Publications

Excellence Cluster "Cognitive Interaction Technology" - Cognition as a Basis for Natural Interaction with Technical Systems. it Information Technology 2/2009 112-118 (with G. Sagerer) Detecting, Assessing and Monitoring Relevant Topics in Virtual Information Environments. IEEE Trans. Knowledge and Data Engineering 3/2009 21(9) 415-427 (with J. Ontrup, S. Scholz and R. Wagner) Trying to Grasp a Sketch of a Brain for Grasping in "Creating Brain-Like Intelligence" (B. Sendhoff et al. Eds) 84-102 2009 (with R. Haschke and J.J. Steil)  ⇒pdf An adaptive P300-Based Online Brain-Computer Interface. IEEE Trans. Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. 16(2) 121-130 2008 (with A. Lenhardt and M. Kaper) Towards Dextrous Manipulation Using Manipulation Manifolds IEEE IROS 2008 pp.2738-2743 (with J. Steffen and R. Haschke)   ⇒pdf Manual Intelligence as a Rosetta Stone for Robot Cognition ISRR 2007 173-184 (with R. Haschke, F. Röthling and J.J. Steil)  ⇒pdf Platform portable Anthropomorphic Grasping with the Bielefeld 20-DOF Shadow and 9-DOF TUM Hand. IROS 2007 pp. 2951-2956 (with F. Röthling and J.J. Steil)   ⇒pdf Variants of unsupervised Kernel Regression: General Cost Functions Neurocomputing 2007 (with S. Klanke) Learning Lateral Interactions for Feature Binding and Sensory Segmentation IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 17(4) 843-863 2006 (with S. Weng, H. Wersing and J.J. Steil). Large-Scale Data Exploration with the Hierarchically Growing Hyperbolic SOM Neural Networks (Special Issue on New Developments in Self-Organizing Systems) 19(6-7) 751-761 2006 (with J. Ontrup)   ⇒pdf Principal Surfaces from Unsupervised Kernel Regression. IEEE PAMI 27(9) 1379-1391 2005 (with P. Meinicke, S. Klanke and R. Memisevic)   ⇒pdf