2026 Call for PhD Applications

News

We are excited to announce that the call for applications to the PhD program 2026 of our Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI (relAI) is now open!

The novel, innovative PhD relAI program offers a cross-sectional training for successful education in AI including scientific knowledge, professional development courses and industrial exposure, providing a coherent, yet flexible and personalised training.

Funded applicants will receive a full salary for three years, including social benefits (TV-L E13 of the German public sector). They may receive additional support through travel grants for conference attendance, research stays, or home travel. Doctoral students are hosted by a relAI Fellow who helps them to define their research project. Depending on the affiliation of this hosting fellow, they enrol at TUM or LMU.

We highly encourage you to apply if you have: 

  • an excellent master’s degree (or equivalent) in computer science, mathematics, engineering, natural sciences or other data science/machine learning/AI related disciplines;
  • a genuine interest to work 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, Robotics & Interacting Systems, or Learning and Education;
  • certified proficiency in English.

📆 Application Deadline: January 13th, 2026

🔗 Apply now: www.zuseschoolrelai.de/application

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

We are happy to announce that Resaro has joined relAI as an Industry Partner! 

Resaro stands for REsponsible - SAfe - RObust. Its mission is to ensure the performance, safety, and security of mission-critical AI systems, which is fundamentally aligned with the four relAI central themes: responsibility, privacy, safety and security. 

Resaro’s Approved Intelligence Platform (AIP) provides modular, scenario-based testing workflows to evaluate mission-critical AI systems in defence, public safety, and critical civil use cases. It delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end testing environment based on a proprietary AI trust ontology with measurable AI Solutions Quality Indicators (ASQI) to test, evaluate, verify and validate on solution or system level with different AI modalities. This evaluation covers various aspects, including quality, performance, safety and security. Recent systems under examination have included anti-money laundering solutions, X-ray imaging anomaly classifiers, deepfake detectors, UAVs, face-in-crowd recognition systems, hypothesis generators for pharmaceutical research, customer service chatbots, and video action recognition solutions, among others.

Additionally, Resaro has developed an innovative approach not only to test for quality but also to describe it in a use-case-specific yet standardized manner. For more information, visit www.resaro.ai/asqi.

Partnership with relAI:

🤝Through this mutually beneficial partnership, relAI Students will gain access to internship and research opportunities, while relAI will expand its network by adding unique skills. Additionally, Resaro will strengthen and broaden its open-source trust community, exchanging knowledge with both academic institutions and industry partners.

 

It was a remarkable symposium! Yesterday, relAI members had the privilege of hosting numerous guests at the Haus der Bayerischen Wirtschaft to reflect on the topic of responsible transformation through generative AI in science, industry, and society.

The event began with warm welcome addresses from the relAI Directors, State Secretary Dr. Rolf-Dieter Jungk (BMFTR, virtual), and the presidents of our two universities, Prof. Thomas Hofmann (TUM) and Prof. Matthias Tschöp (LMU).

Inspiring keynote talks from Prof. Frank Fitzek (TU Dresden) and relAI Fellows Prof. Julia Schnabel (Helmholtz, TUM) and Prof. Stefan Feuerriegel (LMU) addressed reliability challenges in the areas of communication networks, medical imaging, and decision-making, respectively. Additionally, relAI Fellow Prof. Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci (TUM) introduced the exciting new relAI research area “Learning & Instruction,” which focuses specifically on AI in Education.

In a captivating panel discussion, Dr. Philipp Baaske (LMU, VP Entrepreneurship), relAI Fellow Prof. Claudia Eckert (acatech, President), Anna Kopp (Microsoft Digital Germany, CIO/CDO), and Maria Sievert (founder of inveox) exchanged views on balancing innovation, safety, and scale, highlighting their perspectives on the present and future of governance, certification, and ecosystem responsibility.

relAI students took the stage to share their experiences as members of relAI.  Tzu-Yuan Huang, Amine Ketata, Sofiia Nikolenko, and Johanna Topalis talked about how relAI has influenced their careers and the opportunities it has provided for their professional development. In addition, our guests had the opportunity to engage in discussions with relAI students during the poster session, learning more about relAI research.

🙏 Thank you to all the speakers, moderator Petra Bindl, and relAI students for their contributions to the success of this event.

Don’t miss this photo gallery showcasing the best moments of the event!

The annual meeting of the three German Zuse Schools - ELIZA, SECAI, and relAI - funded by DAAD in 2022, was hosted by ELIZA this October in the beautiful halls of Technische Universität Darmstadt. The meeting highlighted the Zuse School initiative´s success in attracting international AI talent and providing an exceptional, innovative education closely connected to the industry. Most importantly, it served as a wonderful "family gathering," reinforcing the strong ties that have developed among the three schools.


The program began with welcome addresses by Prof. Dr. Matthias Oechsner, Vice President for Research at TU Darmstadt, and Dr. Michael Harms, Deputy Secretary General of the DAAD, and was followed by intriguing keynote lectures from Prof. Dr. Markus Reichstein and Dr. Claudius Gläser, representing the academic and industry sectors, respectively. This was followed by many exciting presentations from our students showcasing their outstanding research results, including that of relAI PhD Student Valentine Idakwo. A panel discussion featured the participation of relAI Fellow Volker Tresp, and an interesting poster session encouraged interactions among members. The program was rounded off by an impressive, guided tour through robotics lab.

🙏Thank you, ELIZA, for the great organization of the event!

🙏 A heartfelt thanks to DAAD and BMFTR for supporting us! A great thanks also to our presidents, Matthias H. Tschöp and Thomas F. Hofmann, for their additional support and for creating such inspiring environments at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Technische Universität München for our Zuse School relAI!  

relAI is proud to have supported the KI-Symposium 2025, which took place yesterday at the historic Große Aula of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The event brought together researchers, students, and guests from academia, industry, and the public to celebrate the vibrant and diverse AI landscape at LMU, one of the two universities affiliated with relAI.

Throughout the evening the breadth, depth, and societal relevance of the research presented stood out. It's difficult to pick a single highlight from such a packed program. The event included forward-looking opening remarks by LMU Vice President for Digital Strategy, Prof. Dr. Julia Dittrich, and Dr. Christian Scharpf from the Landeshauptstadt München. Attendees enjoyed an insightful keynote by relAI Fellow Prof. Dr. Björn Ommer, an engaging panel on  LMU's AI strategy featuring Vice Presidents Prof. Dr. Julia Dittrich, Dr. Philipp Baaske, and relAI Fellow Prof. Dr. Jochen Kuhn, a demonstration of PathoPan by Aicendence as part of the AI Transfer, pitch talks by LMU’s newly appointed AI professors, and the presentations of the AI-HUB@LMU Prize.

When we try to help the most vulnerable, and we have limited resources to deploy, should we invest them in building better prediction models, or is it sometimes more effective to simply expand access and help more people, even if the targeting isn´t absolutely perfect?

If you’d like to learn more about it, check out the 👉 podcast!

In this episode of Executive Code, PhD student Unai Fischer Abaigar discusses his paper The Value of Prediction in Identifying the Worst-Off. He explains how governments utilize AI to allocate limited resources—and when it is more effective to enhance predictive models versus simply expanding access to public programs. Using real data from Germany’s employment offices, Unai’s research challenges the assumption that better prediction always means better outcomes in public decision-making.

🎉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/

Don’t miss the upcoming  Munich AI Lecture featuring Prof. Yoshua Bengio from Université de Montréal.

As AI capabilities accelerate, a critical question emerges: can we ensure these systems remain aligned with human values? While advances in reasoning and planning bring us closer to broadly human-level intelligence, recent findings also reveal troubling behaviors such as deception, hacking, and resistance to shutdown.

In his Munich AI Lecture, Yoshua Bengio will explore these challenges and outline a safer path forward. He argues for the design of non-agentic yet trustworthy AIs — systems modeled after a selfless scientist, dedicated to understanding the world rather than pursuing their own goals. Such “Scientist AIs” could act as monitors, helping society manage more powerful agentic systems and reduce existential risks. Beyond technical solutions, Bengio calls for political coordination at national and international levels, treating transformative AI as a global public good essential for safeguarding democracy and stability.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion, including panelists Andrea Martin (Chief Technology Officer, IBM), relAI Director Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok, and Stephanie Jacobs (Head of Office, Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts), which will be moderated by Dr. Michael Klimke (CEO, BAIOSPHERE).

📍 Bavarian Academy of Sciences Alfons-Goppel-Str. 11 (Residenz) 80539 Munich

📅 23 October 2025  

🕡 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

About the Speaker

Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor at Université de Montréal, Founder and Scientific Advisor of Mila, Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero, and Canada CIFAR AI Chair. A recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award — often called the “Nobel Prize of computing” — he is the most cited computer scientist worldwide and among the most cited living scientists across all fields. Bengio is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Knight of the French Legion of Honor, and currently chairs the International AI Safety Report.

Registration

The event is already fully booked. If you would like to get put on the waiting list, please send  a message: events@baiosphere.org

The lecture will also be available via LIVESTREAM on YouTube (no registration needed).

More information:

https://baiosphere.org/en/events/2025/munich-ai-lecture-prof-yoshua-bengio

https://www.lmu.de/ai-hub/en/news-events/all-events/event/munich-ai-lecture-prof.-yoshua-bengio.html

Last weekend, relAI engaged with children during the TUM Open Doors with the Mouse 2025 event at the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI). Students from relAI - Manuel Hülskamp, Natascha Niessen, Lisa Schmierer, and Richard Schwank - enthusiastically participated, using computer games to explain concepts of machine learning and artificial intelligence to the young attendees. The children learned how to train an AI model to differentiate between apples, pears, bananas, and plums, and they even had the opportunity to recognize their own faces, testing this feature with their siblings and other visitors.

A heartfelt thank you to the relAI students and coordinator Andrea Schafferhans for their support of the event, as well as to the families who participated.

Check the MDSI news for extensive information about the event.