Dr. Wieland Holfelder is Vice President of Engineering and leads the Google Engineering Center in Munich, where Google now has more than 1800 employees since 2008. He is also a Senior Advisor for Alphabet’s Other Bets (Waymo.com, Intrinsic.ai, X.company, …) and for Sovereign Cloud in Europe. The work the teams in Munich are doing includes privacy and security engineering, the Google browser Chrome, the Google Account, and future Google products and services in areas such as automotive, AI developer tools, or Google Sovereign Cloud. Prior to Google, Dr. Holfelder worked in Silicon Valley for over 12 years, including for Mercedes-Benz Research and Technology North America, Inc. as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Before that he worked for ICAST Corporation and FVC.com, two Silicon Valley internet startup companies in the field of streaming video. After studying computer science and economics at the University of Mannheim, he worked on his doctoral thesis in computer science and networking at the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg, at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA and at the University of Mannheim. In 2020 Dr. Holfelder was recognized as a “GI Fellow” by the Gesellschaft für Informatik (gi.de).

In addition, Dr. Holfelder is a member of the senate of acatech, the German Academy of Science and Engineering (en.acatech.de), a member of the supervisory board of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (dfki.de/en), a member of the AI ​​council of the Bavarian state government, a member of the supervisory board of the  the University Hospital of the Technical University of Munich, the Klinikum Rechts der Isar (mri.tum.de), a member of the Board of the Security Network Munich (security-network-munich.org), a member of the Board of Trustees of the Deutsches Museum (deutsches-museum.de), a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Institute for Inventions (dieselmedaille.de), a member of the Board of Directors of the Münchner Kreis (muenchner-kreis.de/en), a member of the advisory board of the Munich Data Science Institute (mdsi.tum.de/en) of the Technical University of Munich (tum.de/en), and a member of the advisory board of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt.digital/en).

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