Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Joern Ploennigs was appointed in September 2022. Previously, he led as STSM at IBM Research the international research on AI@Scale for Digital Twins and Future of Infrastructure and developed new AI products to optimize sustainability in facility and asset management. He worked in particular on AI methods that combine semantic knowledge graphs with machine learning and optimisation models to automate Digital Twins. Before that, he led the junior research group "Energy Design" at TU Dresden and, as a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, the Data Science group at the Irish Collaborative Research Center ITOBO for Sustainable and Optimised Building Operation. He studied electrical engineering at TU Dresden and received his PhD in computer science. He habilitated in 2017 at TU Dresden on the topic "Automating the Internet of Buildings" in which he presents methods for the automation of design and analysis methods for sustainable buildings.