Eckehard Steinbach

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eckehard Steinbach is a Full Professor of Media Technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), affiliated with the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology. His research focuses on haptic communication, the Tactile Internet, multimedia systems, and machine learning-driven analysis of sensory data. He holds an IEEE Fellowship (2015) for contributions to visual and haptic communications and has led projects like the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI).

Education: Studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, University of Essex, and ESIEE Paris. Earned a Ph.D. from Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (1999). Postdoc at Stanford University (2000–2002).

Research Interests: Haptic data compression, teleoperation, networked multimedia systems, and applications of machine learning in sensory data analysis. Key projects include the IEEE 1918.1.1-2024 standard for haptic codecs and 5G-based teleoperation systems.

Awards: ERC Starting Grant (2011–2015), Alcatel-Lucent Research Award (2011), VDE-ITG Publication Award (2009).

Grants and Projects: Led initiatives in tactile internet, 5G testbeds for eHealth, and radar-based human activity monitoring. Collaborates on robotics and remote collaboration systems via platforms like the Munich 5G Research Hub.

Labs/Teams: Chair of Media Technology at TUM, contributing to TUM-IAS and the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI).