relAI New Research Area

Fellow

Education is a crucial societal priority and a strategic focus for the application of reliable AI. To address this, relAI has introduced a new research area: Learning & Instruction. This initiative will be led by relAI fellows Prof. Jochen Kuhn from LMU and Prof. Enkeledja Kasneci from TUM, both of whom are experts in educational technology. 

Learning & Instruction focuses on exploring how reliable AI can be used to transform education in meaningful and responsible ways. It investigates the potential of intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive feedback, and digital learning assistants to personalize learning paths and provide targeted support. At the same time, it examines the broader effects of AI on teaching and learning: how AI systems shape learner motivation, teacher roles, and the dynamics of human-AI collaboration. 

By bringing together expertise from artificial intelligence, learning sciences, and educational research, Learning & Instruction aims to develop robust and trustworthy AI applications that not only advance technology, but also serve pedagogical goals and democratic values. .

We are excited to announce that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Starting Grant to relAI Fellow Niki Kilbertus for the project DYNAMICAUS, which focuses on advancing the understanding of cause-and-effect relationships in complex dynamical systems.

Many global challenges, from climate change to healthcare and pandemic preparedness, involve systems where small changes can have far-reaching effects. Understanding how interventions influence outcomes in such complex dynamics requires reliable “if-then” reasoning. Traditional mathematical dynamical models often oversimplify these systems, while purely data-driven machine learning models, though powerful, can be difficult to interpret and may not generalize well to new situations. The DYNAMICAUS project addresses this gap by combining machine learning methods with rigorous mechanistic modeling and methods from causal inference.

DYNAMICAUS aligns closely with the mission of relAI. Its goal is to provide reliable insights that address complex societal challenges in a responsible and impactful way. Additionally, a key application area for these methods is medicine & healthcare, where the aim is to enhance treatment planning by improving the anticipation of patient outcomes.

More Information:

https://www.nat.tum.de/en/nat/latest/article/six-erc-starting-grants-for-researchers-at-tum/

https://www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/newsroom/news-all/artikel/niki-kilbertus-receives-erc-starting-grant-for-causal-analysis-in-complex-systems

🎉 Congratulations!

The month of July has brought excellent news for our relAI Fellows. Prof. Fabian Theis and Prof. Pramod Bhatotia have each received a European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept Grant, which supports scientists who want to develop marketable innovations based on their research results.

Pramod Bhatotia's ERC-funded project is set to optimize cloud computing by enhancing the security and reliability of online systems. Meanwhile, Fabian Theis´s initiative aims to integrate single-cell genomics, advanced computational models, and generative AI to tackle one of the biggest challenges in drug therapy: precise targeting. For more information on the funded projects, please visit this site.

The innovative research of Fabian Theis has also been recognized with the 2025 International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Innovator Award. This recognition is presented annually to a leading scientist who not only makes progressive contributions to computational biology but also consistently pursues unexplored directions in the field.

Finally, Prof. Nassir Navab has been awarded the renowned 2025 IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Technical Achievement Award for his pioneering role in establishing medical augmented reality, surgical data science, and robotic imaging as research fields.

👏 Congratulations!

relAI Fellow Jochen Kuhn has been elected Vice President for Innovation in Education and Teacher Training of LMU. Alongside the other nine new Vice Presidents appointed last week by the LMU University Council, Jochen Kuhn will play an active role in shaping the discourse on addressing the social challenges of our time. To succeed in this endeavour, interdisciplinarity, combined with specialist expertise in key areas such as digitalization and artificial intelligence, is essential.

Jochen Kuhn has served as the Chair of Physics Education at LMU’s Faculty of Physics since 2022, and he is working in AI in Education within relAI. This election will accelerate the advancement of this area.

For more Information, click this link.

🎉 Congratulations!

We are thrilled to announce that the paper The Value of Prediction in Identifying the Worst-Off co-authored by relAI PhD student Unai Fischer Abaigar, relAI Fellow Christoph Kern, and Juan Carlos Perdomo, from Harvard University, has been selected for an Outstanding Paper Award at ICML 2025, one of the top-tier conferences in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence.     

This is an exceptional outcome, considering that only six papers have received this recognition out of more than 12000 submitted this year.

relAI has been instrumental in fostering the collaboration that led to this significant outcome by funding Unai Fisher Abaigar's research stay at Harvard University. Visits to international centres are one of the components of the relAI PhD curriculum, designed to support collaborations with international researchers and gain international research experience on the topic of the reliability of artificial intelligence (AI).  

The paper tackles aspects of the Algorithmic Decision-Making relAI research area and the relAI central theme Responsibility, exploring how predictive models, particularly those using machine learning, can be used in government programs to identify and support the most vulnerable individuals.

👏 Congratulations!

On 1 July 2025, relAI fellow Claudia Eckert will assume the office of Scientific President of acatech - National Academy of Science and Engineering. She was unanimously elected by the acatech Executive Board.

acatech, founded in 2002 and established as the German Academy of Science and Engineering in 2008, represents the interests of German technical sciences independently, in self-determination and guided by the common good, at home and abroad. acatech is organized as a working academy that advises politicians and the public on forward-looking issues concerning the technical sciences and technology politics.

This is a significant recognition of Professor Eckert's leadership and expertise in the field.

For more information, please see the following links:

We are proud to announce that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an Advanced Grant to relAI Fellow Albrecht Schmidt for the project titled “AI Twins of Human Experience: Towards Personal Generative AI Systems for Amplifying Human Cognition.”

ERC Advanced Grants are highly prestigious, providing support to established and leading principal investigators who are pursuing groundbreaking and high-risk projects. This newly funded project aims to establish a scientific foundation for creating AI twins of human experiences. The goal is to store and process these experiences in a way that seamlessly enhances human cognitive and creative abilities. This initiative has the potential to transform the use of personal data, fostering cognitive augmentation and social connectivity through AI.

Find more information about this exciting project via the links below:

https://www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/news-overview/news/two-erc-advanced-grants-for-lmu-researchers-2.html

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/advanced-grants-2024-examples-projects#AItwin

🥂Congratulations!

relAI Fellow Björn Ommer has been awarded the 2024 Eduard Rhein Award Technology Prize. The award ceremony took place on 24 May 2025 at the Flugwerft Schleißheim.

The Eduard Rhein Foundation has honoured Björn Ommer and his team, a group of pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. Through open and efficient model architectures, the group has democratized access to generative AI. Their approach demonstrates the potential of generative AI not only for images, but also for other modalities such as audio and text, thus laying the foundation for a wide range of applications – from media production, where realistic or creative content is created for presentations, to prototyping in automotive design, to synthetic data to support diagnostics in medical research.

Follow this link to read the complete article.

relAI warmly welcomes TUM Professor Alexander König to our school. Prof. König is the Interim Head of the Chair of Robotics and System Intelligence and the Scientific Lead of Project Geriatronics at the Technical University of Munich.

His work sits at the intersection of medicine & healthcare and robotics & interacting systems, directly addressing the central themes of our program: Safety, Security, Privacy, and Responsibility. He follows two main research directions: i. Translating AI-controlled robotic technology from laboratory to patient, to investigate the real-world effects of AI and robotics on healthcare and caregiving. ii. Using AI and robotics to understand how aging affects cognitive abilities and motor control in the elderly, with the aim of optimizing quality of life through technology.

He will contribute to relAI through lectures and workshops on medical technology and robotics, teaching young scientists the path toward real-world application of their ideas with patients. Additionally, his insights on conducting user studies, navigating CE certification processes, and developing commercialization strategies through startups will further enrich research at relAI.

The Roland Berger Foundation (RBS) and TUM have begun a collaboration to promote the AI skills of socially disadvantaged children and young people. RBS works with 70 partner schools throughout Germany to provide scholarships to talented primary school pupils from the second grade onwards from socially disadvantaged families.

relAI Fellow Enkeledja Kasneci is the scientific director of the project. The scholarship holders learn how to use AI responsibly and reflectively. AI tools are also being developed to better support children and young people with difficult starting conditions

For more information, please visit the websites of Roland Berger Foundation and TUM.