Saarbrücken computer science starts teaching again in presence

Professor Jürgen Steimle during the semester kick-off event. Foto: SIC/Philipp Zapf-Schramm

After two years of digital teaching due to the Corona pandemic, Computer Science at Saarland University will restart with face-to-face teaching in the summer semester of 2022. At the start of the semester, the students of the computer science programs were welcomed at various welcome events. In addition, the computer science students’ representative council again presented its “Busy Beaver Award” for outstanding commitment to teaching.

The 2022 summer semester is not only something special for first-semester freshmen: “Basically, we have five ‘beginner cohorts’ at once,” explains Professor Jürgen Steimle, who since April 2022 has been Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Saarland University. This is because students who began their studies between the summer semester of 2020 and the winter semester of 2021/22 will also attend classroom courses on campus for the first time this year. “Thus, it is an exciting and unusual start of the semester even for more experienced students,” says Jürgen Steimle.

But also for lecturers a new semester is always connected with excitement – not at least because of the traditional award ceremony of the “Busy Beaver Award”, with which the students’ representative council of computer science honors particularly outstanding courses of the past semester at the beginning of each semester. The following courses were presented with the award:

In the Base Lectures category, Professor Markus Bläser was awarded for the course „Foundations of Theoretical Computer Science”. In the Core and Advanced Lectures category, there were two award winners this year due to strong competition. Bioinformatician Dr. Michael Hutter received the Busy Beaver Award for the course “Modern Methods in Drug Discovery” and Professor Derek Dreyer of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems was honored for the course “Semantics.” In the seminar category, Dr. Yang Zhang from CISPA won with his course “Privacy of Machine Learning”, but was unable to accept the award in person.

“We are very happy to welcome our students back on site at the Saarland Informatics Campus. We wish everyone a good start to the semester and that they will quickly get used to the ‘new old’ situation,” says Professor Jürgen Steimle.

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
900 scientists (including 400 PhD students) and about 2100 students from more than 80 nations make the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) one of the leading locations for computer science in Germany and Europe. Five world-renowned research institutes, namely the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics and the Cluster for “Multimodal Computing and Interaction” as well as Saarland University with three departments and 24 degree programs cover the entire spectrum of computer science.

Editor:
Philipp Zapf-Schramm
Competence Center Computer Science
Saarland Informatics Campus
Phone: +49 681 302-70741
E-Mail: pzapf@mmci.uni-saarland.de