News Archive

Alexander Koller has been elected a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the world’s largest professional society for computational linguistics. Among the eleven new ACL Fellows this year, the Saarbrücken professor of computational linguistics is the only European.

How do we create AI systems that facilitate learning rather than dictating it? Meet Saarland University’s LaLa Lab. Directed by Professor Tomohiro Nagashima, LaLa Lab explores how we learn, how AI can improve learning, and how to make sure learners keep their agency in a society where automated learning is starting to become the status quo. To achieve this, the lab stands at the intersection of human-computer Interaction, the learning sciences, cognitive science, and psychology.

In keeping with a long-standing tradition in Saarbrücken computer science, the student councils of Computer Science and of Language Science and Technology (LST) jointly organized a torchlight procession to honor Professor Doctor Alexander Koller, supported by the Freunde der Saarbrücker Informatik (FdSI) and Friends of LST. The aim was to convince the professor, who has received a call from another university, to continue his teaching and research at Saarland University.

Researchers from Saarland University and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have, for the first time, shown that the reactions of humans and large language models (LLMs) to complex or misleading program code significantly align, by comparing brain activity of study participants with model uncertainty. Building on this, the team developed a data-driven method to automatically detect such confusing areas in code — a promising step toward better AI assistants for software development.

We are delighted to announce that the 2025 ACM SIGBED Technical Achievement Award has been awarded to Professor Reinhard Wilhelm of Saarland University. This award, established by ACM SIGBED in 2022, recognizes significant and sustained contributions to research and system implementations in embedded, real-time, and cyber-physical systems. It honors technical achievement whose impact has been long-lasting and deeply felt across the SIGBED-relevant domains.

AI assistants have rapidly become part of everyday life – whether through our interactions with large language models like ChatGPT or in medical applications that help interpret complex datasets. Yet, despite their widespread use, AI systems still make surprisingly simple mistakes that persist even after extensive training. They also lack the ability to think logically or to truly ‘understand’ nested input. For Michael Hahn the problem lies in the architecture itself.

Outstanding research performance in academia is often measured by how frequently a scholar’s work is cited by others. Each year, the ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ list recognizes leading experts in specific fields whose publications are among the most frequently cited worldwide. This year, three researchers from Saarland University have once again earned a place on the prestigious list, reflecting their exceptional academic reputation.

When writing program code, software developers often work in pairs—a practice that reduces errors and encourages knowledge sharing. Increasingly, AI assistants are now being used for this role. But this shift in working practice isn’t without its drawbacks, as a new empirical study by computer scientists in Saarbrücken reveals. Developers tend to scrutinize AI-generated code less critically and they learn less from it. These findings will be presented at a major scientific conference in Seoul.