Three Million Euros in EU Funding for Two Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Yiting Xia and Thomas Leimkühler, Photo: MPI-INF/Bertram Somieski

Dr. Yiting Xia and Dr. Thomas Leimkühler awarded ERC Starting Grants

Whether it is novel digital models for representing the world or the development of new cloud infrastructures for artificial intelligence, the European Research Council (ERC) funds excellent pioneering research through Starting Grants. These grants support early-career researchers worldwide whose work has the potential to shape our society. This year, two members of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics are being awarded a Starting Grant: Dr. Yiting Xia and Dr. Thomas Leimkühler will each receive around 1.5 million euros to carry out their projects over the next five years.

Dr. Yiting Xia is a Tenure-Track Faculty member at MPI-INF and heads the Network and Cloud Systems research group. In her ERC project, Synchronous Optical Network Infrastructure for the Cloud (SONIC), she investigates how data centers can be efficiently adapted to meet the demands of AI workloads.

The focus of her project is on Data Center Networks (DCNs), the critical network infrastructure for cloud computing. These serve as the nervous system of a cloud data center, functioning like a fully automated sorting system in a massive logistics hub: they direct a digital flood of data packets to their correct destinations, determining data paths in fractions of a second. Traditionally, electrical packet switches have handled this task—acting as traffic crossings to forward each individual data packet. However, the boom in artificial intelligence is pushing these electrical switches to their physical limits. The enormous data volumes of modern AI models overwhelm the hardware, leading to delays in packet delivery and a massive increase in energy consumption, ultimately preventing the infrastructure from scaling effectively.

Yiting Xia aims to solve this problem by rethinking DCN infrastructure: moving away from electrical data transmission toward optical networking technologies, which transmit data streams as light signals. She plans to leverage powerful optical components, such as Optical Circuit Switches, to transform DCNs from a mere connectivity substrate into active system elements for AI.

Training and serving large AI models require thousands to hundreds of thousands of accelerators (such as GPUs) performing highly coordinated, synchronous computations. “These processes exhibit recurring and predictable communication patterns. In my project, I am investigating whether the network can be redesigned around the structure of AI computation, rather than forcing AI workloads onto networks designed for traditional, unpredictable traffic,“ says the Saarbrücken-based Max Planck researcher.

The goal is to significantly increase the data-delivery and energy efficiency of DCNs through new technologies and close coordination of system components, while simultaneously enhancing resilience and simplifying maintenance.

Dr. Thomas Leimkühler is a Senior Researcher at MPI-INF, where he leads the Image Synthesis and Machine Learning research group. In his ERC project, From Microscopic to Monumental: Learning Visual Scene Representations Across Vastly Different Scales (MonuMicro)“, he aims to solve a fundamental challenge in visual computing: How can our world be digitally represented in such a way that both entire landscapes and microscopic details are unified in a single model?

Modern reconstruction and rendering techniques can, for example, capture individual objects with high precision or realistically depict entire cities and landscapes. However, when vastly different scales come together, they reach their limits: A model describing a mountain landscape loses minute details, while a model of an insect can no longer relate to its surroundings. This is where Leimkühler’s MonuMicro project comes in. Instead of incrementally improving existing methods, he seeks to establish entirely new theoretical and algorithmic foundations to represent the visual world across many orders of magnitude in a single, cohesive model.

To achieve this, MonuMicro combines the mathematical scale-space theory with modern machine learning and generative AI methods. The new approach explores, for instance, how missing information can be inferred from a few recorded image data points while ensuring that fine details and large-scale structures remain consistent with one another.

“The results could be applicable across many fields: In robotics, autonomous systems could gain a much better understanding of their surroundings; virtual and augmented reality could become more realistic and experience no noticeable loss of detail. Other sciences, such as archaeology or geosciences, could also benefit from the ability to visually connect large contexts with the finest details,” says the Saarbrücken-based Max Planck researcher.

Thomas Leimkühler has experience in developing new scene representations: 3D Gaussian Splatting, a technology co-developed by Leimkühler, has become the international standard for efficiently rendering three-dimensional scenes and has been cited nearly 12,000 times in just three years. With this ERC project, he is now taking a decisive step further, aiming to lay the groundwork for representing the visual world across many scales in a unified model.

According to the European Research Council, a record 4,807 research proposals were submitted in the current round of ERC Starting Grants. Of these, 421 were selected for funding (8.8%), totaling 705 million Euro. Across Europe, 22 projects in computer science received funding, five of which are from Germany. Two of these five projects are based at MPI-INF, with a third going to Michael Hahn from Saarland University. This means that 2026 three of the five German ERC Starting Grants in computer science are located at the Saarland Informatics Campus.

Further Information:
ERC press release: https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2026-starting-grants-results
Website MPI for Informatics: https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/de/home
Website of Yiting Xia’s research group: www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/de/departments/network-and-cloud-systems
Website of Thomas Leimkühler’s research group: https://ismael.mpi-inf.mpg.de/

Editor and press contact:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Joint Administration
Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Tel: +49 681 9325 4509
Email: pzs@mpi-klsb.mpg.de