Biographical Sketch

Since October 1999, Ernst A. Heinz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston/Cambridge, USA. In July 1999, he earned his ``Doktor'' (Ph.D.) degree with ``Auszeichnung'' (summa cum laude) from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, after completing his studies on ``Scalable Search in Computer Chess'' which started in early 1997. Before, from April 1992 to December 1996, Ernst was a research assistant at the Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization (IPD), School of Computer Science (CS), University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he worked on the design and compilation of general-purpose parallel programming languages and on the efficient parallelization of multi-modal speech recognition.

While participating in various commercial software projects between 1988 and 1991, he wrote several programming books in German. Then he founded a computer-chess group and joined IPD's ``Project Triton''. Ernst's publications about computer chess and the successful performances of his chess program DARKTHOUGHT in the last six world championships have earned him international attention. Equally so did his previous works in language (Modula-2*, Modula-3*) and compiler design for general-purpose parallel programming. His research interests include computer game-playing, experimental CS, game-tree search, parallelism, programming languages, compiler construction, and research methodology.

Ernst A. Heinz was born in Cologne, Germany, on April 8, 1967. He received his ``Abitur'' (A-Level) degree in 1986 from the Albertus-Magnus Gymnasium (AMG) in Bensberg, Germany, and his ``Vordiplom'' (B.Sc.), ``Diplom'' (M.Sc.), and ``Doktor'' (Ph.D.) degrees in ``Informatik'' (CS) from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1989, 1992, and 1999 respectively. His ``Abitur'' won both prizes for the best A-Level overall and the best A-Level in Natural Sciences of the year 1986 at AMG. For his Master's degree and thesis he received the annual award of the ``Forschungszentrum Informatik'' (FZI), a CS research center in Karlsruhe that honours the best CS graduates of the university each year. Ernst's article on ``Extended Futility Pruning'' in the ICCA Journal 21(2) won the international Prof. Salvatore Award 1998 for the best work by a junior researcher in the field of ``Algorithms for Selective Search''. His article about ``Efficient Interior-Node Recognition'' in the ICCA Journal 21(3) won the ICCA Journal Award 1999 for the best contribution to the journal by a Ph.D. student from April 1998 to March 1999. His Ph.D. thesis received the ChessBase Award 1999, recognizing the work as the biggest contribution to the field of computer chess worldwide in 1999. The thesis was published as an internationally available book (ISBN 3-528-05732-7) by Vieweg Verlag within their series ``Computational Intelligence''. Last but not least, DARKTHOUGHT became World Microcomputer-Chess Vice-Champion in June 1999.

Ernst A. Heinz is a member of the ACM, the GI, the IEEE Computer Society, and the ICCA (International Computer-Chess Association).


Created by Ernst A. Heinz, Tue Jan 30 14:53:38 EST 2001