Saarbrücken professors of computer science reach top positions in AI ranking

Scientific Excellence: View of some of the computer science institutes on the Saarland Informatics Campus. © Oliver Dietze

The “AI Rankings” platform lists researchers from all over the world who work on topics related to artificial intelligence (AI) and ranks them according to their publication output. The website thus aims to address the growing interest in research on artificial intelligence and to provide an overview of the lively research activities in the field. A good dozen professors of computer science from Saarland University and the surrounding research institutes occupy top positions in national comparison. They conduct joint research on various AI topics at the “Saarland Informatics Campus”.

Professor Jörg Hoffmann ranks first in the “Core” category. This category refers to publications at the most important AI conferences that consider the research field as a whole. He ranks third in the “Knowledge Representation” area which focuses on the transformation of knowledge into formats that can be used by computers. Hoffmann is professor at Saarland University since 2012 and vice dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science since 2020.

The location has positioned itself particularly strongly in the “Computer Vision” sector. Professor Bernt Schiele, scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and chairman of the newly established Saarbrücken branch of the international AI network ELLIS, ranks first in national comparison and 20th on an international level. Professor Christian Theobalt from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science ranks sixth in Germany, and Professor Mario Fritz, who now researches at the Helmholtz Centre for Information Security Cispa, ranks ninth.

Professor Gerhard Weikum from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and Dean of the Max Planck Research School for Computer Science comes third in the “Machine Learning and Data Mining” category. Professor Jilles Vreeken, who does research at the Helmholtz Centre for Information Security Cispa, is in ninth place. Professor Antonio Krüger, head of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence since November 2019, ranks fourth in the “Interaction” category and Matthew W. Crocker, Professor of Psycholinguistics in the department of Linguistics and Language Technology at Saarland University, ranks second in the research field of “Cognitive AI” in a national comparison.

The study programme also profits from the excellence of the location’s researchers. For example, a new Bachelor’s and Master’s program “Data Science and Artificial Intelligence” has been launched in the winter semester 2019/2020. This interdisciplinary subject teaches students how to analyze problems in such a way that they can be solved automatically using methods from Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Big Data and Machine Learning. The course is both research and application-oriented and covers all of the above research areas. The program, which recently started its third semester, already has around 300 students enrolled.

Background AI rankings:
The ranking is based on the publication lists of the individual researchers from the database “dblp Computer Science Bibliography”. From all publications of an individual researcher, those publications are extracted for the ranking which were published at top international conferences of AI or the AI sub-areas. The underlying list of conferences was compiled by professors of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

The platform AI-Rankings is provided with the support of the project “REGIO” of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the University of Würzburg.

AI-Rankings is available at https://airankings.professor-x.de/

Background Saarland Informatics Campus:
800 scientists and about 2000 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 Computer Science, 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 21 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