News Archive

Three, then Saarbrücken-based, scientists were awarded for a publication issued 11 years ago. The committee acknowledged with the SEOUL Test of Time Award the long-lasting and sustainable influence of the ontology “YAGO”. Since a decade, this semantic and formal representing data base extracts and links text-based entries from Wikipedia and other internet sources.

If software errors go undetected, this can not only reduce sales significantly. In the worst case, people die. Finding errors before launching the software also costs a lot of money. According to a study by Cambridge University, software developers spend half of their programming time finding and repairing bugs. Andreas Zeller, professor of software engineering Saarland University and researcher at the CISPA – Helmholtz-Center in Gründung, has therefore already developed several techniques that [...]

Tino Hempel, teacher of mathematics, physics and computer science at the Richard-Wossido-Gymnasium in the city of Ribnitz-Damgarten in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, has been awarded the teacher prize of the Saarbrücken computer science in Munich. Hempel accepted the prize endowed with 2,500 euros at the 109th Federal Congress of the “Verbandes zur Förderung des MINT-Unterricht”, MNU for short. Since 2015, the award has been donated by the computer science institutes at Saarland University. [...]

The US multinational corporation General Motors has already announced the first self-driving car for the coming year; Saarland’s scientists are also researching this new vehicle type. Hence, “Autonomous driving in the region and beyond” was the title of the IT theme evening, which attracted more than 60 people on March 15 to the visualization center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). The Competence Center Computer Science Saarland had organized the [...]

Expertise in data science is in demand in every industry now. To hold their own against competitors, companies need to draw the right conclusions from their digital data and evaluate them carefully. Four renowned informatics experts from Saarland University want to support such companies. Hence they are in the process of founding the consulting company “D:AI:MOND”. In their “Data Science Consulting” service they want to incorporate the latest research findings in order to [...]

Steel is used to build cars, wind turbines and bridges and there are currently about 5000 different types of steel available on the market. But how can steel producers guarantee that a particular steel will always exhibit the same high quality? Up until now experienced experts analyzed material samples under the microscope and carefully compared the results against reference images. But classifying materials in this way is not free from errors. Using machine learning techniques, computer scientists [...]

Until now, photographers and filmmakers had to use special equipment if they wanted to change the focus area in post-processing or reproduce an object three-dimensionally. The start-up K-Lens has now developed a special lens that can turn any standard camera into a 3D camera. What began as a research project of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University, and was developed further with the help of the IT Inkubator, is expected to become available as a commercial product starting in 2019.

Thomas Lengauer, director at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and spokesman of the Center for Bioinformatics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, has become president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).

In the analysis of the human genome, one question researchers have so far left unanswered is how to differentiate the variants of a gene inherited from the mother and father. Such information would increase the likelihood of treating certain diseases successfully. The so-called third generation of sequencing technologies is now making this possible. One of the most important tools for solving this complex puzzle is special software developed by scientists at the Center for Bioinformatics at Saarland [...]

One of Germany’s most prestigious awards for basic research with high practical relevance goes to Professor Dr. Christian Theobalt. The computer scientist receives the Beckurts Prize 2017 for his trend-setting insights and developments to efficiently capture human movements, poses, gestures, and facial expressions from videos and transfer them into 3D models. His methods are characterized by the fact that he does not use markers on clothing or bodies to capture people in real environments in [...]

Since the beginnings of informatics, computer scientists have also brought the art of deduction to computers, so that they can support humans in thinking and even prove statements that can be formulated mathematically. Hence, researchers delve into mathematical logic and develop formal systems, based on and evaluated by deductive principles. For their nearly 20-year-old research, three Saarbrücken computer scientists have now received the internationally renowned Thoralf Skolem Award.