News – Press Releases

Volker Maria Geiß, former head of the joint administration of the Max Planck Institutes for Informatics and Software Systems, is celebrating his 70th birthday. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he has been involved in the founding of four Max Planck Institutes, helped to establish a new research field within the Max Planck Society and provided many impulses for the scientific landscape in the Saarland. At the age of 70, he can look back on a career marked by his passion for promoting science and building successful research institutes.

Paul Strohmeier has been bestowed with an ERC Grant to research and develop algorithms to vibrate actuators in such a way that they generate sensations of movement. Strohmeier's research focuses on Kinesthetic Displays, a new class of devices that enable us to experience and perceive movements, even those we do not physically perform.

New research area "Vision and Language Models (VLMs)" at the Saarbrücken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction and Artificial Intelligence under the direction of Professor Bernt Schiele

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest and most prestigious international scientific society in the field of computer science, has named Anja Feldmann, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and Professor at Saarland University, an "ACM Fellow". This honors her influential contributions to the data-driven analysis of operational networks. Worldwide, only 68 new ACM Fellows were named for 2023.

The vision has already been played out in many sci-fi series and novels: Instead of simple video calls, people talk to each other as digital avatars as if they were sitting in the same room, although, in reality, there are thousands of kilometers between them. For this kind of "telepresence" to be possible, the users need to have photorealistic digital images, which can be generated in real time with little computing effort. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken are working on the basic research behind such applications. As part of these efforts, they are building a cutting-edge computer science laboratory that will house some of the world's leading technical equipment.

Computer scientist Anja Feldmann, director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, has been honored by the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) with the Konrad Zuse Medal. The Zuse Medal is the highest award in computer science in Germany. She is being honored for her outstanding achievements in the field of computer networks and her research on Internet traffic during the corona pandemic. The award will be presented on September 28 at the GI's INFORMATIK FESTIVAL 2023 in Berlin.

Imagine being able to try on different clothes on a virtual avatar and see how they look from every angle. Or adjusting the direction your pet is looking in your favorite photo. You could even change the perspective of a landscape picture. These types of photo edits have always been challenging, even for experts. A novel AI tool now promises that with just a few mouse clicks, anyone can achieve edits like these effortlessly. The method is being developed by a research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, in particular by the Saarbruecken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction, and Artifical Intelligence (VIA) located there.

Don't be surprised to see pills with unusual shapes in the near future. At first sight they may look funny, but they can release pharmaceuticals inside the body in a controlled manner. Using a combination of advanced computational methods and 3D printing, objects are produced that dissolve in liquids in a predetermined manner. A group of Computer Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and the University of California at Davis, have invented a process that relies solely on the shape of the object for a time-controlled release. This will have important implications for the pharmaceutical industry, which has recently begun focusing sharply on 3D printing.

In June, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany and Google have announced a strategic research partnership to start the "Saarbrücken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction and Artificial Intelligence (VIA)" at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. During the opening event today, November 9, representatives from politics, science and industry are gathering in the Günter-Hotz lecture hall at Saarland University to learn more about the mission and research of the new Center.

Danupon Nanongkai has been appointed Scientific Member by the Max Planck Society as of August 1, 2022. As a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, he will lead a department exploring fundamental issues at the frontier of algorithms and complexity theory.

Hans-Peter Seidel, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and Honorary Professor at Saarland University, has been honored by the world's largest computer science association, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), for his seminal contributions to the research field of computer graphics.