Falk Schwendicke has been awarded the 2026 IADR Distinguished Scientist Award in Cariology

award

🎉 relAI is proud to announce that the International Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (IADR) has named relAI Fellow Falk Schwendicke as the recipient of the 2026 IADR Distinguished Scientist William H. Bowen Research in Dental Caries Award 🦷 .

IADR is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing dental, oral, and craniofacial research for global health and well-being. This esteemed IADR award recognizes exceptional and innovative contributions to our understanding of caries etiology and the prevention of dental caries. It is one of the 17 IADR Distinguished Scientist Awards and is considered one of the highest honors bestowed by the organization.

Falk Schwendicke’s Research Achievements

His early work focused on minimally invasive and evidence-based caries management, particularly regarding selective carious tissue removal and its economic evaluation. This research has laid the groundwork for contemporary treatment guidelines. His recent studies have increasingly emphasized the integration of emerging technologies to overcome challenges in caries detection and management. Notably, he has been a pioneer in employing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications for radiographic analysis, diagnostic support, and predictive modeling.

A significant achievement in his career was leading a randomized controlled trial that evaluated AI-assisted caries detection. This study set new standards for clinical research in the field and informed subsequent cost-effectiveness analyses. Schwendicke also participates in numerous editorial and review roles and has presented at the IADR General Session and various scientific meetings. He has authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications and 30 book chapters and is ranked among the top 1% of most-cited dental researchers worldwide, according to the Stanford global ranking.

👉 Information sources

https://www.iadr.org/about/news-reports/press-releases/falk-schwendicke-named-recipient-2026-iadr-distinguished

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/prof-dr-falk-schwendicke-9bb6271a1_iadr2026-activity-7444709023079350272-kiFG/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAMg4egBnT-dMw4VyJR7tdTe0Z-9xhGUZZI

🎉 Congratulations!

relAI is thrilled to announce that Frauke Kreuter, relAI Fellow and member of the relAI Steering Committee, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science. Founded in 1848, this non-profit international organization promotes scientific freedom, responsibility, education, and collaboration to improve humanity, serving over 120,000 members.

Being elected as a Fellow is a prestigious honor that recognizes individuals whose contributions to advancing science and its applications in service to society have distinguished them among their peers and colleagues.

👉 More Information: https://www.lmu.de/ai-hub/en/news-events/all-news/news/prof.-dr.-frauke-kreuter-wins-2026-waksberg-award.html


🎉 Congratulations to the relAI PhD student Johanna Topalis and relAI Fellow Prof. Michael Ingrisch!

🏆 The article they co-authored, “ChatGPT makes medicine easy to swallow: an exploratory case study on simplified radiology reports”, has been awarded the Most Cited Article in European Radiology (Impact Factor 2024) by the European Society of Radiology! The work was presented at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2026 in Vienna and honoured by the Editor-in-Chief of European Radiology, Prof. Bernd Hamm.

📖 The article presents the first exploratory case study evaluating the quality of simplified radiology reports generated by the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT. Radiologists rated the reports as generally high quality but also identified errors that could lead to harmful patient interpretations. The findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of early large language models in clinical communication: while simplified reports can enhance accessibility, medical expert supervision and domain-specific adaptation are vital to ensure patient safety.

💡 The study, first published as a preprint in December 2022, was among the earliest scientific assessments of ChatGPT's ability to simplify radiology reports for patients. Since then, a rapidly growing body of research has explored the role of large language models in medical text simplification.

👉 Publication: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-023-10213-1

      Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14882


👏 Congratulations to relAI PhD Student Jan Simson and relAI Fellow Prof. Christoph Kern!

We are excited to announce that their article Preventing Harmful Data Practices by using Participatory Input to Navigate the Machine Learning Multiverse has been awarded the DGOF Best Paper Award 2026!  This honour, which includes a prize of 500 euros,  was presented at the annual GOR conference in Cologne on February 26, 2026.

The German Society for Online Research (DGOF) annually recognizes outstanding scientific contributions to the advancement of the methods of online research through the DGOF Best Paper Award.

Their award-winning paper emphasizes the importance of transparency and accessibility in key decisions throughout the machine learning pipeline for the general public. It introduces a participatory approach to help navigate the multiverse of design choices, advocating for the democratization of essential decisions rather than simply focusing on optimization.

📖 To the article:

  • Simson, J., et al. (2025). Preventing Harmful Data Practices by using Participatory Input to Navigate the Machine Learning Multiverse. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 806, 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713482

👉More information on the following links:

🎉 Congratulations to our relAI Fellows Daniel Rueckert and Fabian Theis 💐

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has announced the twelve recipients for its $20 million AI for Science fund. This initiative aims to accelerate research in health, agriculture, biodiversity, and climate.

The Technische Universität München is among the organizations that received funding to advance health research. TUM Professors and relAI Fellows Daniel Rückert and Fabian Theis will developa multiscale foundation model connecting individual cells to entire organs. This model will let clinicians simulate disease progression and evaluate potential treatments in a digital environment.

We look forward to following the project's development!

👉 More information on the following links:


🎉We are thrilled to share that relAI Fellow Tom Sterkenburg has been awarded the 2025 Karl-Heinz Hoffmann Prize by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW). The Award was presented by the president, Markus Schwaiger, at the Academy’s Ceremonial Annual Meeting on 6 December.

The BAdW is a non-university research institution and a community of scholars dedicated to conducting innovative, long-term research that primarily aims to preserve cultural heritage in the humanities. It provides a unique platform in Bavaria for intergenerational networking among top researchers. A key aspect of promoting the younger generation is the annual science prizes.

The Karl-Heinz Hoffmann Prize, donated by the Ulrich L. Rohde family, is awarded alternately in the fields of humanities and natural sciences. Tom Sterkenburg works at the intersection of philosophy, statistics, and computer science. His work combines mathematical modelling, algorithmic simulation, and philosophical analysis to provide new insights into the classic problem of induction, particularly in the context of machine learning. In this way, he is making a groundbreaking contribution to the dialogue between philosophy and data-driven science.

Congratulations!

More Information:

https://badw.de/die-akademie/presse/pressemitteilungen/pm-einzelartikel/detail/generationenuebergreifende-spitzenforschung-wissenschaftspreise-der-badw-wuerdigen-herausragende-leistungen.html

🎉Congratulations!

We are thrilled to announce that Frauke Kreuter, a relAI Fellow and member of the relAI Steering Committee, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Waksberg Award. This prestigious award recognizes her significant impact on survey methodology and her role in training the next generation of researchers.

The Waksberg Award is presented by the American Statistical Association and by Statistics Canada's Survey Methodology journal to honor outstanding contributions to survey statistics and methodology.

As part of this recognition, Frauke Kreuter will deliver the Waksberg Invited Address at the Statistics Canada Symposium in 2026 and will also publish a paper in the December 2026 issue of Survey Methodology.

More Information:

https://www.lmu.de/ai-hub/en/news-events/all-news/news/prof.-dr.-frauke-kreuter-wins-2026-waksberg-award.html

🎉 Congratulations!

We are excited to announce that a team consisting of relAI PhD students Shuo Chen, Bailan He, and Jingpei Wu, along with relAI Fellow Volker Tresp and members of the Torr Vision Group from the University of Oxford and TU Berlin, received the Honorable Mention Award at OpenAI Red-Teaming Challenge on Kaggle.  They ranked among the top 20 teams (Top 3%) out of 5,911 participants and over 600 teams.

The Red Teaming Challenge, initiated by OpenAI, tasked participants with probing its newly released open-weight model, gpt-oss-20b. The objective was to identify previously undetected vulnerabilities and harmful behaviors, such as lying, deceptive alignment, and reward-hacking exploits.

Would you like to learn more about the awarded work?

The write-up of the hackathon and the accompanying paper, “Bag of Tricks for Subverting Reasoning-Based Safety Guardrails,” detail the findings of the study, revealing systemic vulnerabilities in recent reasoning-based safety guardrails like Deliberative Alignment.

👉 Check them out: https://chenxshuo.github.io/bag-of-tricks/

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.