Congratulations to relAI fellow Björn Ommer

Awards

Congratulations!

Our relAI Fellow Björn Ommer was nominated for the Deutscher Zukunftspreis for his work on "Democratisation of Generative AI - Stable Diffusion from Development to Practice".

With the Deutscher Zukunftspreis, the German Federal President acknowledges outstanding achievements in technology, engineering, and science, as well as software and algorithm-based innovations that significantly expand the international state of research and technology and are already being used in practice. The prestigious award is endowed with 250,000 euros.

Björn Ommer and his team have developed a groundbreaking Stable Diffusion Model for image generation, which serves as a foundational technology for many AI models, including those from Google and OpenAI.

We’re proud to have Prof. Ommer in our relAI family.

Congratulations! relAI student Sameer Ambekar wins the best paper award at the MICCAI Workshop on Advancing Data Solutions in Medical Imaging AI (ADSMI). 

Sameer is a PhD student at relAI, advised by the relAI Fellow Julia A. Schnabel. His research focusses on test-time adaptation and domain generalization for medical imaging. 

His award-winning paper “Selective Test-Time Adaptation for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection using Neural Implicit Representations”, co-authored with Julia A. Schnabel and Cosmin Bereca, presents a novel zero-shot methodology to adapt models in real time to test images from new domains using deep pre-trained features. The approach is validated on brain anomaly detection data. 

This work addresses domain shift at test-time, which Sameer explains in more detail in his recently published relAI blog post. In the post, you can also learn about the importance of handling domain shifts to make AI more reliable: https://zuseschoolrelai.de/blog/mitigating-domain-shifts/  

Congratulations on this achievement!  

Congratulations to relAI fellow Johannes Maly on winning the 2024 ACHA Charles Chui Young Researcher Best Paper Award!

This annual award honors the exceptional contributions of young researchers in the field of harmonic analysis, selected by the editors and publisher of the Journal Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (ACHA). 

Johannes received this recognition for his paper, “Robust Sensing of Low-Rank Matrices with Non-Orthogonal Sparse Decomposition,” published in November 2023 (Vol. 67, ACHA). His research focuses on understanding how to leverage intrinsic models or data structures and how the loss of information caused by digital processing (quantization) affects theoretical results. This is highly relevant for resource-aware and reliable AI

We are excited to announce that relAI fellow Daniel Rückert has been awarded the prestigious MICCAI Enduring Impact Award 2024! 

Daniel Rückert holds the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for AI in Medicine and Healthcare at TUM. His research focuses on developing advanced algorithms for biomedical image analysis, including segmentation, registration, and deep learning methods to support reliable AI in healthcare applications. 

The MICCAI Society (Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention) recognized Daniel Rückert for his outstanding, lasting contributions to the field. His work has significantly advanced the application of AI in biomedical imaging, helping create reliable, clinically impactful solutions. 

Congratulations on this achievement!  

We are excited to congratulate our relAI fellow, Prof. Björn Ommer, on receiving the prestigious 2024 German AI Innovation Award!   

This recognition honors his pioneering work on Stable Diffusion, a generative AI model that has democratized image generation. Stable Diffusion enables users to create high-quality images from text descriptions, making advanced image generation accessible through open-source software without the need for expensive hardware. This innovation exemplifies our mission at relAI, which focuses on advancing reliable AI systems. 

The German AI Award, presented by WELT, recognizes innovations that drive the future of AI both in theory and application. Björn Ommer’s recognition reflects his significant role in shaping the evolution of reliable and transparent AI systems. 

Our heartfelt congratulations! 

Figure: © Fabian Helmich; Graphic generated with stable diffusion. 

relAI Fellow Pramod Bhatotia wins the 2024 Rising Star in Dependability Award: 

 “For his impressive track-record and contributions in the field of dependable systems, including multiple publications in highly regarded venues, and influence on practical dependable systems.” 

Pramod Bhatotia is a professor for Systems Research at TU Munich and fellow at relAI. He received the award at the 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, which took place last week in Brisbane, Australia.  

The award aims to recognize a junior researcher, “who demonstrates outstanding potential for creative ideas and innovative research in the field of dependable and resilient computer systems and networks”.  

More information: https://dsn2024uq.github.io/awards_rs.html 

Our congratulations! 

Image Copyright (c): Thomas Abé/Studienstiftung

Congratulations to relAI student Maria Matveev! 

The German National Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung) has awarded Maria the Civic Engagement Award 2024 for her exceptional volunteering work with Lern-Fair. Maria co-founded and chairs Lern-Fair e.V., a non-profit organization dedicated to providing free educational opportunities for underprivileged pupils. Since the start of the online platform in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, more than 15.000 pupils were supported by free tutoring or group courses. 

Maria is a relAI PhD student at the chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at LMU and the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Her PhD research, advised by the relAI director Gitta Kutyniok, focuses on the mathematical description and understanding of training dynamics related to generalization, a crucial factor for ensuring the reliability of neural networks. 

Learn more about Marias volunteer work in the video portrait (in German): https://youtu.be/EUZdm--sqmc?feature=shared 

We are proud to announce that the German Radiological Society (Deutsche Röntgengesellschaft) has awarded the Alfred Breit Prize 2024 to our relAI fellow Prof. Julia Schnabel. The prize honors outstanding work and developments in the field of radiological research that have significantly contributed to progress in cancer therapy.

Julia Schnabel is Professor for Computational Imaging and AI in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich TUM (Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professorship), and Director at the Institute for Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging at Helmholtz Munich (Helmholtz Distinguished Professorship). Since 2015, she has also been Professor of Computational Imaging at King's College London.

Prof. Schnabel works in the field of medical image processing and machine learning. Her research focuses on the areas of intelligent imaging up to clinical evaluation, including complex motion modeling, image reconstruction, quality assurance, segmentation, and classification applied to multimodal, quantitative, and dynamic imaging.

Congratulations!

We are thrilled to congratulate relAI fellow Prof. Sami Haddadin for his elevation to IEEE fellow. This is the highest membership degree of IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.  

This prestigious distinction was awarded to the director of the TUM Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) “for his contributions to robot safety, tactile robots, and interaction control”. 

Our Congratulations! 

Congratulations to relAI fellows Prof. Sandra Hirche and Prof. Claudia Eckert on receiving the prestigious 2023 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Medals from TUM.

We are excited that the TUM honors the exceptional achievements of Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sandra Hirche with the 2023 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Medals. This annual award of the TUM was presented to the relAI fellows at the recent Dies Academicus in December 2023.  

In the Laudati, Senior Vice President Prof. Gerhard Kramer acknowledged the outstanding contributions of Prof. Dr. Claudia Eckert "at her chair at TUM and as head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC with the protection of IT systems against hacker attacks." Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sandra Hirche was recognized for her "groundbreaking work" in control engineering and systems theory. 

A big congratulations to them both! These well-deserved awards are a testament to their dedication and impact in their respective fields, particularly to reliable AI.  

Please find more information about this prestigious price from TUM: https://www.tum.de/en/about-tum/facts-and-figures/awards-and-honors/awards-presented-by-the-technical-university-of-munich/heinz-maier-leibnitz-medal