Paul Levi

Paul Levi was a German physicist turned computer scientist whose work on artificial intelligence, machine vision and robotics ran through Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. He earned a physics diploma at Mainz in 1972 and a doctorate at Karlsruhe in 1976, then headed the Technical Expert Systems and Robotics department at the Forschungszentrum Informatik of the University of Karlsruhe from 1984. As a professor of informatics at Universität Stuttgart, he supervised eleven doctoral students between 1995 and 2006, and from 1997 he led the Mobility Management and Robotics division at Karlsruhe's Forschungszentrum Informatik until his retirement in 2009. His 2010 book Symbiotic Multi-Robot Organisms, written with Serge Kernbach, describes swarms of robots that dock into single artificial organisms. He died in 2024.

Born: 1944
Died: 2024
Works: 306
Badges: Pioneer

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

1972–1976

Physics at Mainz and Karlsruhe

Born in 1944 in Oppeln, he completes his diploma in theoretical physics at the University of Mainz in 1972. He then moves to the Institute for Nuclear Physics at the University of Karlsruhe and earns his doctorate there in 1976.
1984

Expert systems and robotics department

After moving into the university's Institute for Informatics and Robotics, he becomes head of the Technical Expert Systems and Robotics department at the Forschungszentrum Informatik of the University of Karlsruhe in 1984.
1988

Habilitation on assembly-robot planning

He completes his habilitation in informatics at Karlsruhe in 1988 with the thesis Planen für autonome Montageroboter, on planning for autonomous assembly robots. In 1988 he also receives a call to a professorship in informatics, with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine vision, at the Technische Universität München.
By 1995

Professor at Stuttgart

By 1995 he is a professor of informatics at Universität Stuttgart, working on distributed AI, machine vision and massively parallel systems at the Institut für Parallele und Verteilte Hochleistungsrechner. Eleven doctoral students complete their degrees under him there between 1995 and 2006.
1997–2009

Mobility and robotics division

From 1997 he leads the Mobility Management and Robotics division at Karlsruhe's Forschungszentrum Informatik, a post he holds until his retirement in 2009.
2002

Informatics textbook with Rembold

In 2002 he and Ulrich Rembold publish Einführung in die Informatik für Naturwissenschaftler und Ingenieure with Carl Hanser Verlag, an introduction to computer science for natural scientists and engineers.
2010

Symbiotic Multi-Robot Organisms

He and Serge Kernbach publish Symbiotic Multi-Robot Organisms: Reliability, Adaptability, Evolution with Springer in 2010. The book describes large-scale swarms of robots that dock with each other and share energy and computational resources as one artificial-life-form, and it draws on the EU projects Symbrion and Replicator.
November 2024

Death in 2024

He dies in November 2024.