e.g. Welcome Week, Retreat, DAAD Inauguration,…
Last week, our industry partner, QuantCo, hosted a networking event with relAI at their new Munich office.
The relAI students had a wonderful evening filled with engaging conversations and delicious food. They had the opportunity to meet colleagues from QuantCo's AI, and engineering teams and learned about how the company develops scalable systems to transform messy, real-world data into impactful decisions.
We are very grateful for the invitation!
relAI is proud to support SIPTA, the Summer School on Imprecise Probabilities 2026, which will be held in Munich from Monday, July 27, to Friday, July 31, 2026.
The school is organized by the Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML), Institute of Informatics, and AG Augustin, Department of Statistics, both at LMU Munich. The organizing team includes relAI Fellows Eyke Hüllermeier and Göran Kauermann, as well as relAI PhD Student Yusuf Sale.
Registration is still open at: https://doo.net/en-us/widget/222538/buchung?booking_widget_config_name=booking-16129-108356&organizerId=16129&locale=en-us
We are pleased to share relAI’s contribution to the European Embodied Robotics Week, whichtook place last week in Munich. The event was organizedby RoboTUM together with START Munich and the ESRA (European Student Robotics Association) network.
The Robotics Festival convened a diverse range of stakeholders from the European robotics and physical artificial intelligence ecosystem. Specialists, students, and robotics enthusiasts participated in city-wide events, including open houses at robotics laboratories, makerspaces, and studios throughout Munich, as well as a hackathon.
The event ended with a summit featuring talks and panels from leaders in embodied intelligence. relAI was represented in the panel discussion “Dexterity and Manipulation for robotics” by relAI Fellow Prof. Khadiv.
Last week, the relAI family gathered for our annual retreat in the beautiful and serene Bad Kohlgrub, from June 17th to 19th. During this time, relAI students, fellows, directors, and management came together to share ideas and visions for the future of our school, the role of AI in education, and the future of science in the era of agentic AI.
The program included keynote talks from relAI fellows Enkelejda Kasneci, Sandra Hirche, Niki Kilbertus, and Christoph Kern. It also featured lightning talks by relAI students, group discussions, and fellow/student one-on-one sessions. Additionally, there was plenty of time for networking and social activities.
In the one-on-one sessions, relAI fellows and students connected directly to discuss their research experiences, career paths, and future aspirations. These conversations provided a unique mentorship opportunity, often sparking new perspectives for both mentors and mentees.
This year's group discussions focused on questions about the two strategic pillars that are currently reshaping the landscape of reliable AI:
A highlight of this year’s retreat was the presentation of the final relAI certificates to MSc and PhD students who completed the program. This moment provided an opportunity to reconnect with relAI alumni and learn about their career paths after leaving relAI.
This inspiring retreat strengthened our community and paved the way for our efforts to shape the future of reliable AI.
A big thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to making this event a success!
On June 8, 2026, TUM hosted the International Symposium 'Future Learning: Global Perspectives, European Pathways' as part of the new relAI research area Learning & Instruction.
We are pleased to share the initial insights and lessons learned from this engaging event!
👉https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7471257638538813440/
Frontier AI systems have recently solved IMO problems, discovered new mathematical constructions, and resolved open Erdős problems. Yet a more mundane question remains: 🤔how should a working mathematician actually use these tools day to day?
In this talk, titled “The Agentic Researcher: Turning AI Coding Agents into Research Assistants” Emil Partow, PhD Student of our relAI Director Prof. Gitta Kutyniok presented a recent paper from Prof. Pokutta (Zuse-Institut Berlin) that offers a concrete answer. The authors propose a five-level taxonomy of AI integration into research, ranging from classical work without AI to fully autonomous research loops. They have implemented this idea within an open-source framework.
Following a detailed presentation by Emil Partow, members of relAI and Prof. Kutyniok's research group gathered to discuss this forward-looking topic. The presentation explained the open-source tool that implements core research "commandments" (such as preventing the falsification of experimental data) via a practical, actionable loop. Participants then discussed how AI agents are already shaping research methodologies, what is required to implement these workflows successfully, and how to ensure human oversight remains at the center of the process. Emil also shared a practical case study demonstrating the tool in action, sparking a broader reflection on the evolving role of AI in modern research.
🔮How will artificial intelligence (AI) influence the future of learning?
The 🌍 International Symposium on Future Learning 🎓, organized by the TUM Center for Educational Technologies and relAI will address this significant question, which lies at the heart of the Learning & Instruction relAI research area.
Key Information
📅 8. June 2026 9:15 - 14:00
📍Lecture hall 605, Marsstraße 20, München
Highlights of the symposium:
To help us plan, please make sure to RSVP via the registration link
We look forward to seeing you on June 8th!
Are you interested in contributing research for underserved communities? Don't miss the EEAMO Conference 2026, the 6th ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization.
relAI is excited to support the conference, which will take place from November 5 to 7, 2026. EEAMO 2026 is organized by LMU, with relAI Fellow Christoph Kern and relAI Student Clara Strasser Ceballos serving as General Chairs.
This event will showcase work across the research-to-practice pipeline, aiming to ensure that algorithmic systems serve a broadly beneficial role in society by advancing equity and expanding access to opportunities for underserved communities.
Call for papers: Important Deadlines!
📅 Abstract: May 1
📅 Paper: May 8
On March 10, relAI students had the privilege of hosting Dr. Sebastian Hallensleben, Chief Trust Officer at the relAI Industry Partner Resaro, as an invited speaker at the relAI student seminar. This seminar serves as an important platform that fosters valuable research exchanges and networking opportunities for our students.
Dr. Hallensleben is an expert at the intersection of AI research, regulation, and industry. He plays a significant role in developing AI standards for Europe as the Chair of CEN-CENELEC JTC 21, where European AI standards are being crafted to support EU regulations. Additionally, he co-chairs the AI risk and accountability initiatives at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
About the Talk
In his talk, he shared valuable insights on the landscape of international AI standards and their development. The first half of the session focused on the EU AI Act, detailing how the currently developing landscape of harmonised standards will provide the technical basis for legal compliance. Moving from regulation to practice, he was joined by Linus Stach to demonstrate how Resaro interacts with this landscape in the development of their AI evaluation platform, navigating the complexity of accurately communicating technical metrics to a wide audience of stakeholders. The speakers then demonstrated their evaluation framework using a case study based on public crime statistics from Baden-Württemberg. They showed how the framework can be used to assess model performance dimensions (such as privacy, consistency and correctness), compare different models, and ensure compliant application. The seminar concluded with an extensive and detailed discussion on the practical challenges of defining and achieving AI reliability in real-world scenarios.
More about the Speaker
Sebastian is the initiator and Programme Chair of the Digital Trust Convention and is Principal Advisor Digital Trust at KI Park. As Chief Trust Officer at Resaro, he works towards drilling down to ground truths about capabilities of AI systems. - Previously, Sebastian Hallensleben headed Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence at VDE Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies. He focuses in particular on operationalising AI ethics, on characterizing AI quality and on building privacy-preserving trust infrastructures for a more resilient digital space.
On January 20, 2026, researchers from relAI, MDSI and our industry partner SAP gathered for a pitchtalk session at the SAP Labs Munich Campus in Garching. In an interactive setup, participants from the three organizations exchanged research insights and explored ideas for future collaborations.
The afternoon opened with short welcome words from representatives of SAP (Dr. Tobias Müller), MDSI (Sylvia Kortüm) and relAI (Dr. Mónica Campillos). The following pitchtalks covered a wide range of topics relevant to AI and Data Science, spanning methodological approaches to practical research resources.
Pitchtalk Session
The talks introduced methodologies and applications across various research fields, from uncertainty modeling to personalized medicine and research data infrastructure.
Max Beier, a relAI PhD student, discussed the advantage of using linear-operator methods in dynamical systems. By focusing on linear operators, his approach supports optimal control, scalable optimization algorithms, and reliable forecasting across time scales ranging from milliseconds to days. He showed that this methodology allows efficient learning of system behavior, modeling of trajectory distributions, and generation of coherent sequences, addressing current limitations in decision‑making models for complex dynamical environments.
Parastoo Pashmchi, an industrial PhD student at SAP, introduced an efficient algorithm to handle missing data, a common challenge in AI projects. She presented an ML‑based imputation method that preserves the original data distribution by sampling from the conditional distribution of nearest neighbors, overcoming the limitations of common techniques like kNNImputer. By enabling uncertainty quantification and multiple imputations, her approach improves the reliability of predictive models such as SAP’s green energy forecasting use case, where missing solar production data can significantly undermine model accuracy.
Mario Picciani, an MDSI PhD student, highlighted recent developments and applications of ProteomicsDB, a proteomics resource established in 2012 through a collaboration between MDSI Core Member Prof. Bernhard Küster and SAP. ProteomicsDB is a powerful multi‑omics, multi‑organism platform that enables real‑time exploration of proteomic, transcriptomic, and drug‑interaction data across the tree of life, supporting research from basic biology to large‑scale initiatives. With expanding capabilities for analyzing drug mechanisms, predicting cell responses, and supporting precision oncology, the SAP HANA–powered resource could become a central tool for biomarker discovery, systems biology, and personalized medicine.
Sebastian Gallenmüller, an MDSI PhD student, presented SLICES-DE, a digital research infrastructure for computing and communication, embedded within a European collaborative network. As a national digital research infrastructure for ICT, SLICES‑DE offers remote‑accessible testbeds, reproducible workflows, and long‑term data management to support research in areas such as 6G, AI, cybersecurity, and cloud‑edge systems. Built as a community‑driven, flexible, and scalable platform, it enables shared experiments, training, and industry collaboration, providing both academia and companies with a versatile environment that can even be booked for individual lectures or large‑scale projects.
Networking over pretzels and lemonade
An informal networking session after the pitchtalks gave speakers and participants from relAI, MDSI, and SAP the opportunity to connect, exchange impressions, discuss research interests, and explore potential collaborations.
We thank our industry partner SAP for hosting this event and sharing insights into ongoing research projects – we look forward to future editions!