In Memoriam: Martin Wolpers, PhD 1969-2016

IT is with great sadness that we inform you that Martin Wolpers, a member of our editorial board, passed away suddenly on Thursday, February 25, 2016 at the age of 47. He leaves behind his loving wife Marion, his daughter Sina and his son Leon. Martin was a magnificent person, a friend, colleague, teacher, and mentor to many. He had a talent for bringing people together and could bring out the best in young people. Exemplary of this are the many research projects where he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional project manager, always combining a good sense of humor, friendliness, and efficiency. Martin started his research career at the University of Hannover in 1997 as a PhD student. During this time, he designed the KBS hyperbook system, a model-based data repository. After obtaining his PhD in 2001, Martin became Deputy Managing Director at the L3S Research Center in Hannover. During this time, he was able to win and later manage the PROLEARN project, the first so-called ‘Network of Excellence’ in Technology Enhanced Learning financed by the IST programme of the European Commision. Although the PROLEARN project ended in 2008, many of the project results like the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, the EC-TEL conference series, and the JTEL summer schools are still tangible today. Martin made sure that not only the project results but also the network connection between TEL researchers would persist. In 2005, Martin moved to Leuven, Belgium, where he started as a Post-Doc Researcher in the HyperMedia and DataBases (HMDB) group of Erik Duval. While at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, he worked on Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM), a metadata schema for modelling a user’s actions. He was one of the architects of EATEL in 2007 and was the driving force behind the ECTEL conference and the JTEL Summer School. He often modestly referred to himself as the “Helping Hand”. In 2008, he moved to Siegburg, Germany, after winning “the Fraunhofer Attract Stipend”. At the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT), Martin founded and led the Context and Attention in Personalized Learning Environments (CAPLE) research group. He continued his work on CAM and was involved in several European as well as national research projects. He successfully coordinated the European integration project ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environment) and MACE (Metadata for Architectural