relAI welcomes new Fellows

Fellow

We are delighted to welcome five exceptional fellows to relAI: Alin Albu-Schäffer, Angela Schoellig, Björn W. Schuller, Christian Wachinger, and Stephan Bauer. 

Each of them brings their own expertise and insights that will further enrich our research agenda and scientific community. From diverse backgrounds in Medicine, Robotics and Data Science, they are dedicated to making significant contributions to the advancement of reliable AI. 

Alin Albu-Schäffer is director of the Institute of robotics and Mechatronics at the DLR – German Aerospace Center and professor at TUM. Methods of safe AI are attributed special importance in robotics, where artificial intelligence interacts with the physical world through complex machines. His research offers both interesting application fields and new questions for reliable AI. 

Angela Schoellig recently moved to Munich from Toronto upon being awarded an AI Humbold professorship, an award which aims to attract top international scientists to German universities. Further, she is a member of the board of directors at MIRMI. Her Chair of Safety, Performance and Reliability for Learning Systems at TUM perfectly aligns with the research topics of relAI.  

Björn W. Schuller, professor for health informatics at TUM and Klinikum rechts der Isar, works on responsible methods for medicine and healthcare. He has a background in speech recognition and works as the CSO of the Audio Intelligence company audEERING. 

Christian Wachinger is professor for AI in radiology at Klinikum rechts der Isar. A common motif of his research is “Bias and Fairness”, but his research also concerns causal inference and application of AI methods to medicine and healthcare. 

The final addition to relAI is Stephan Bauer, who is senior group leader at Helmholtz and associated professor for Algorithmic Machine Learning & Explainable AI at TUM. His research focuses on causality and deep learning. He also has background in robotics and healthcare as domain application areas of AI. 

Join us in welcoming these five to the relAI community! 

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  

Congratulations to the relAI PhD Student Lisa Wimmer, the relAI fellow Bernd Bischl, and the relAI director Stephan Günnemann on the best paper award of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2023).

ECML PKDD is Europe’s top machine learning and data mining conference, with over 20 years of successful events and conferences across the continent. The ECML PKDD 2023 was held in Turin, Italy from the 18th to the 22nd of September 2023.

List of authors and title of the awarded paper:Jonas Gregor Wiese, Lisa Wimmer, Theodore Papamarkou, Bernd Bischl, Stephan Günnemann, David Rügamer    
Towards Efficient MCMC Sampling in Bayesian Neural Networks by Exploiting Symmetry

relAI is happy to welcome five new relAI fellows from TUM, LMU and the research center Helmholtz AI.

The expertise of the new fellows on reliability AI  will strengthen the relAI research and education, particularly on the Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations relAI Focus area. New fellow Prof. Dr. Daniel Cremers (TUM) is specialised in computer vision and has worked in the AI field for many years, covering aspects of reliable AI. Prof. Dr. Reinhard Heckel (TUM) is interested in developing methods that are robust to worst case perturbation and most importantly to distribution shifts, an integral aspect of reliable AI. Prof. Dr. Johannes Maly (LMU) ´s research is naturally aligned with the goals of relAI. It focuses on understanding how to leverage intrinsic model or data structure and how the loss of information caused by digital processing (quantization) affects theoretical results. LMU fellow Prof. Christoph Kern works at the intersection of statistics, (computational) social science, and data science. His research goals overlap considerably with the research areas and themes of relAI. The research of Dr. Vincent Fortuin (Helmholtz AI) on uncertainty quantification with Bayesian methods also fits perfectly within relAI, especially with the central theme of safety. The contribution of the new relAI fellows to research support, seminars, and lectures will enrich the relAI curriculum and advance the theoretical research of the relAI field.

 

We are proud to report that our relAI fellow Prof. Pramod Bhatotia has received the EuroSys 2023 Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher for his work on systems research.

The EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award rewards junior European researchers who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research, broadly construed. The selection committee chooses the recipient based on demonstrated contributions that have had impact and are creative and innovative, along with demonstrated promise for making lasting and fundamental contributions to the field. 

The award is named in honor of Jochen Liedtke, one of the most prominent researchers on microkernel architecture. His work culminated with the L4 microkernel design, which rethought inter-process communication from the ground up. The award is given annually at the EuroSys conference, in memory of Jochen and his fundamental contributions to the systems community.

Find more information here.