Wolfgang Maass (A) received his doctoral degree in 1974 and his habilitation in 1978 at the University of Munich. In 1982 he became an Associate Professor and in 1986 a Full Professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Since 1991 he has held the chair for Foundations of Information Processing (Grundlagen der Informationsverarbeitung) at Graz Technical University in Austria. In 1992 he became the head of the new Institute for Foundations of Information Processing at this university. In 1997/98 he was invited to become a Sloan Fellow by the Computational Neurobiology Lab of the Salk Institute (USA).