Birgit Pfitzmann

Short CV

Birgit Pfitzmann is a researcher in the IBM Zurich Research Lab, performing research on accelerated dicovery, most recently for the climate space. From 2017 to 2019 she led several activities on natural-language processing in pre-contract engagement. From 2014 to 2016 she was a core archictect for a large customer engagement on migration to hybrid cloud with emphasis on disaster recovery. From 2012 to 2013, she was responsible for building up a Services Innovation Lab at the IBM Zurich Research Lab. From 2008-2011, she led the Galapagos group at the IBM Watson research center, performing research on application-data-dependency discovery and its usage in IT management to business-level objectives and in IT consolidation and migration, e.g., to clouds. This resulted in several tools in wide use in IBM, e.g., ALDM.

She joined IBM in 2001 at the Zurich Research Lab. There she was responsible for research in risk and compliance, identity management, web services security, key management, and formal verification of cryptographic protocols. She had served on various taskforces on defining IBM's technology and strategy in security and privacy, and worked closely with IBM's product and services divisions on bringing these technologies to market.

Before joining IBM, she was a tenured professor and dean of the Department for Computer Science at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, one of the top ranked CS departments in Germany. In Saarbrücken she and former students started Sirrix AG, a spin-off company specializing on information security (she is no longer associated with Sirrix). Birgit Pfitzmann is author of 130 research papers in security, privacy, distributed systems, and services research, and regularly serves on the program committees of international conferences. She was the program chair of Eurocrypt 2001 and the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2004, and is the co-program chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2006 and 2007, which are three of the most prestigious international research conferences on these topics. She obtained a Corporate Award, seven Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, one of them major), and two Outstanding Innovation Awards in IBM, and is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Birgit Pfitzmann received a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and a Doctorate from the University of Hildesheim, both in Germany.