relAI Fellow Claudia Eckert Elected President of acatech

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👏 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:

Last week, our industry partner QuantCo generously hosted over 30 relAI students at its offices in Munich. The visit provided a valuable platform for our students and QuantCo colleagues to connect, fostering a friendly environment for discussions on potential future collaborations.

We extend our sincere gratitude to QuantCo for their warm welcome and for facilitating such a beneficial exchange!

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.

We are excited to announce that Airbus, a key player in the global aerospace sector, and QuantCo, a leading data science and AI firm, have become industry partners of relAI.

The research areas of Airbus Central Research and Technology, the central research entity of the Airbus Group, align well with the relAI research areas algorithmic decision-making, and robotics & interacting systems. Furthermore, trustworthy AI, along with relAI’s central themes of safety and security, is essential for establishing a reliable foundation for the use of AI in Airbus's future products and services

In addition to their involvement in events and activities and supporting relAI students, Airbus brings fresh perspectives and potential application areas for AI. The aerospace sector demands a high level of safety and reliability, and this collaboration will contribute to stimulating the development of new research directions.

QuantCo, founded in 2016 by four Harvard and Stanford PhDs. has rapidly grown into a team of 200 data scientists, software engineers, and deep learners. With offices across the US, UK, Switzerland, and Germany (including one in Munich), QuantCo collaborates with market-leading companies in insurance, e-commerce, and automotive. The data science and AI company develops algorithms for, among others, pricing and claims management, and works on topics within the relAI research area medicine & healthcare.  QuantCo will support our students by offering valuable internship opportunities.

 

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.

Europe faces challenges in the competitive field of artificial intelligence (AI). relAI director Gitta Kutyniok shares her insights on the current landscape of AI in Europe and proposes future strategies for developing trustworthy and secure AI technologies:

  • Europe should focus on specialised, efficient, and transparent AI.
  • We should place the emphasis on smart AI research: high-quality training data, efficient models, specialised software and hardware, and open-source approaches.
  • We should further build on another of our advantages: our pool of excellent researchers.
  • AI regulation assures trustworthiness, and Europe could be a role model in this area.
  • An international data privacy agreement for AI can address the data security concerns of AI models.
  • AI models running locally allow personalised teaching and lower costs. This is an enormous opportunity for universities and research institutions because open-source models offer transparency and flexibility.

Read the complete Interview:  https://www.daad.de/de/der-daad/daad-journal/themen/2025/kuenstliche-intelligenz-europa-gitta-kutyniok-relai/

We are excited to announce that the call for applications to the MSc program 2025 of our Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI (relAI) is now open!

The novel, innovative relAI MSc program is an addition to the MSc program at TUM or LMU, offering a cross-sectional training for successful education in AI. It provides a coherent, yet flexible and personalized training by enhancing scientific knowledge, professional development courses and industrial exposure.  

Funded applicants will receive a scholarship of up to 992 EUR (depending on independent income). They are further supported by travel grants, e.g., for home travel.  

We highly encourage you to apply if you have: 

  • an excellent bachelor’s degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering, natural sciences or other data science/machine learning/AI related disciplines;
  • a genuine interest in working on a topic of reliable AI covering aspects such as safety, security, privacy and responsibility in one relAI’s research areas Mathematical & Algorithmic foundations, Algorithmic Decision-Making, Medicine & Healthcare or Robotics & Interacting Systems;
  • certified proficiency in English.

📆 Application Deadline: 17 June 2025 (23:59 AOE)

🔗 Apply now: https://zuseschoolrelai.de/application/#MSc-Program-Application

Please help us in spreading the word, especially to excellent international candidates.

The excellent work of relAI students will be prominently represented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, which will take place at the Singapore EXPO from 24 to 28 April 28 2025.

Thirteen publications from our students will be presented at the conference, nine of them in the main track. Notably, four out of these nine publications have been selected for Oral or Spotlight presentations. This is a significant achievement and demonstrates the high quality of relAI research, considering that only 15% of accepted papers are invited to give a talk.

If you plan to attend the conference, do not miss the opportunity to discuss these publications directly with some of our students. Be sure to attend the Oral presentation by Yan Scholten titled "A Probabilistic Perspective on Unlearning and Alignment for Large Language Models" on the 24th April. You can learn about Lisa Wimmer´s work, "Trust Me, I Know the Way: Predictive Uncertainty in the Presence of Shortcut Learning" at the Workshop on Spurious Correlation and Shortcut Learning: Foundations and Solutions. Additionally, check out the posters of Amine Ketata and Chengzhi Hu!.  Amine will be presenting his work on “Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean Space” and you can talk to Chengzhi Hu about “Surgical, Cheap, and Flexible: Mitigating False Refusal in Language Models via Single Vector Ablation”.

Full list of relAI publications at ICLR 2025:

    Oral Presentation - Main Track

  1. A Probabilistic Perspective on Unlearning and Alignment for Large Language Models
    Yan Scholten, Stephan Günnemann, Leo Schwinn

    2. Spotlight Presentation - Main Track

  2. Exact Certification of (Graph) Neural Networks Against Label Poisoning
    Mahalakshmi Sabanayagam, Lukas Gosch, Stephan Günnemann, Debarghya Ghoshdastidar
  3. Provably Reliable Conformal Prediction Sets in the Presence of Data Poisoning
    Yan Scholten, Stephan Günnemann
  4. Signature Kernel Conditional Independence Tests in Causal Discovery for Stochastic Processes
    Georg Manten, Cecilia Casolo, Emilio Ferrucci, Søren Wengel Mogensen, Cristopher Salvi, Niki Kilbertus

    5. Posters - Main Track

  5. Differentially private learners for heterogeneous treatment effects
    Maresa Schröder, Valentyn Melnychuk, Stefan Feuerriegel
  6. Surgical, Cheap, and Flexible: Mitigating False Refusal in Language Models via Single Vector Ablation
    Xinpeng Wang, Chengzhi Hu, Paul Röttger, Barbara Plank
  7. ParFam -- (Neural Guided) Symbolic Regression via Continuous Global Optimization
    Philipp Scholl, Katharina Bieker, Hillary Hauger, Gitta Kutyniok
  8. Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean Space
    Mohamed Amine Ketata, Nicholas Gao, Johanna Sommer, Tom Wollschläger, Stephan Günnemann
  9. Constructing Confidence Intervals for Average Treatment Effects from Multiple Datasets
    Yuxin Wang, Maresa Schröder, Dennis Frauen, Jonas Schweisthal, Konstantin Hess, Stefan Feuerriegel

    10. Workshops

  10. Trust Me, I Know the Way: Predictive Uncertainty in the Presence of Shortcut Learning
    Lisa Wimmer, Bernd Bischl, Ludwig Bothmann
    Workshop on Spurious Correlation and Shortcut Learning: Foundations and Solutions
  11. Privacy Amplification by Structured Subsampling for Deep Differentially Private Time Series Forecasting
    Jan Schuchardt, Mina Dalirrooyfard, Jed Guzelkabaagac, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Stephan Günnemann
    Workshop on Advances in Financial AI: Opportunities, Innovations and Responsible AI
  12. Cracking the Code: Evaluating Zero-Shot Prompting Methods for Providing Programming Feedback
    Niklas Ippisch, Anna-Carolina Haensch, Markus Herklotz, Jan Simson, Jacob Beck, Malte Schierholz
    Workshop on Human-AI Coevolution
  13. Exact Certification of (Graph) Neural Networks Against Label Poisoning
    Mahalakshmi Sabanayagam, Lukas Gosch, Stephan Günnemann, Debarghya Ghoshdastidar
    VerifAI: AI Verification in the Wild

    Graph Neural Networks for Enhancing Ensemble Forecasts of Extreme Rainfall
    Christopher Bülte, Sohir Maskey, Philipp Scholl, Jonas Berg, Gitta Kutyniok
    Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning

🥂Congratulations!

We are proud to announce that our relAI Director Gitta Kutyniok has been invited to become a member of the US National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI). NAAI is committed to advancing artificial intelligence by fostering collaboration among leading experts and promoting innovative research and development.

The election acknowledges Gitta Kutyniok's distinguished contributions to applied harmonic analysis, compressed sensing, and artificial intelligence. This honor recognizes her leadership as the Bavarian AI Chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), which has significantly advanced research and collaboration in these fields. Additionally, NAAI greatly appreciated her recognition as a SIAM Fellow in 2019 and an IEEE Fellow in 2024, which highlights her outstanding accomplishments and the high regard in which she is held by her peers.