Max Planck Institute for Informatics

How can we fairly distribute computing resources at a university, share medical supplies among countries, or just decide who does which chores at home? All are examples of so-called allocation problems. 🤔 Dr. Hannaneh Akrami, researcher in the Algorithms and Complexity department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, has been selected for the prestigious Minerva Fast Track Programme of the Max Planck Society to study the theory behind such questions. 🎓 Hana’s research lies at the intersection of algorithmic game theory and fairness. During her four-year fellowship, she will explore how to distribute indivisible goods so everyone perceives the result as fair – a fundamental problem in algorithmics with broad real-world relevance. Her mentor for the fellowship is the Institute’s founding director, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Kurt Mehlhorn. Join us in congratulating Hana on this great achievement! 🥳🎉 ↪️ More information on Hana's research and the Minerva Fast Track Programme here: https://sic.link/fasttrack Saarland Informatics Campus

The Max Planck Institute for Informatics was proud to take part in this year’s All Hands Meeting of the German AI Competence Centers in Saarbrücken. Christian Theobalt, Director of the Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence department and Founding Director of the Saarbrücken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence, represented the Institute and delivered the scientific keynote of the event. He spoke about how AI and photorealistic human avatars have the potential to revolutionize future forms of communication and interaction with AI systems, and illustrated the research challenges that are connected to these topics. Many thanks to Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) for the invitation! About the event: On November 4–5, 2025, leading AI researchers from across Germany and France gathered in Saarbrücken for the annual All Hands Meeting of Germany’s AI Competence Centers. Hosted by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) scientists from the university centers BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, Lamarr-Institut, MCML, ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, and the Tübingen AI Center presented and discussed their latest research. For the first time, the French AI community also participated, represented by the competence centers 3IA Côte d'Azur, ANITI Toulouse, Institut DataIA Paris-Saclay, ENACT, PostGenAI@Paris, PR[AI]RIE-PSAI, SEQUOIA, and the national computer science institute Inria. 📸 Oliver Dietze

Congratulations to Yonggang Jiang on receiving one of the 2025 Google PhD Fellowships in the area of “Algorithms and Optimization.” 🥳 🎓 The Google PhD Fellowships recognize and support outstanding doctoral candidates conducting innovative research in computer science and related fields. Yonggang is broadly interested in the design and analysis of algorithms. His current research focuses on graph algorithms, with the goal of understanding their theoretical limits across various settings, including parallel and distributed computing. Yonggang joined the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in the Algorithms and Complexity department of Danupon Nanongkai in 2023. ↪️ For more info, visit his homepage: https://lnkd.in/eetM-Zjb

🤖 Wird die in der EU diskutierte Chatkontrolle bald durch Hintertüren die Privatheit unserer Nachrichten untergraben? Verändern KI-Webbrowser wie die von Perplexity und OpenAI gerade das Internet? Und wird Deutschland mit dem neuen Hochleistungsrechner „Jupiter“ doch noch zur Supercomputing-Nation? 📰 Um bei der rasanten Entwicklung neuer Technologien noch durchzublicken, ist fundierter Journalismus gefragt. Die Medien sollten der breiten Öffentlichkeit vermitteln, welch enorme gesellschaftliche Relevanz in vielen Themen der Informatik steckt. 🏅 Die besten Beiträge aus dem Jahr 2025 werden daher mit dem Journalismuspreis Informatik geehrt. 📅 Bewerbungen sind bis zum 16.01.2026 möglich. ➡️ Alle Infos hierzu: sic.link/journalismuspreis #journalismuspreisinformatik #journalismuspreis2025 #uds #saarlanduniversity #saarlandinformaticscampus #sic #Informatik #KünstlicheIntelligenz #KI #TechJournalismus #Wissenschaftskommunikation

📣 We are hiring! Tenure-track faculty openings. 🗓 Deadline: December 1st 2025. Apply now and join our team! The Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) invite applications for tenure-track faculty positions in all areas of computer science and at its intersections with other disciplines. Multiple positions are available. 📌 Why should you apply? Faculty enjoy full academic freedom, lead teams of PhD students and postdocs, and have the chance to teach university courses. They also benefit from steady institutional funding in addition to external grants, excellent technical resources, and internationally competitive salaries. 📌 Requirements: A doctoral degree in computer science or related fields and an outstanding research record are required. ↪️ For more information on how to apply, visit us at: https://lnkd.in/eEdMGVGR

Two new Emmy Noether research groups established at the MPI for Informatics, led by Dr. Jan Eric Lenssen and Dr. Karol Węgrzycki. Together, they will receive approximately 3.7 million euros in funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation to set up their groups in Saarbrücken. Their research broadly focuses on algorithms and machine learning. 🎓 📌 Dr. Jan Eric Lenssen’s group, Spatial Modeling and Reasoning, will explore how AI systems can extract more infromation from sparse visual data. To this end, he will work on efficient spatial representations and machine learning methods that perform spatial reasoning across these representations. 📌 Dr. Karol Węgrzycki’s research group will investigate packing problems: a class of optimization challenges that appear in many practical situations ranging from cargo loading to material cutting, and how insights from different areas of theoretical computer science can be combined to solve them more efficiently. Both researchers are now part of the prestigious Emmy Noether Programme, which supports outstanding early-career scientists in leading independent groups for up to six years, qualifying them toward a university professorship. Join us in congratulating Jan and Karol on this remarkable achievement! 👏 ↪️ Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eYAVTuzx

ICCV 2025 🌺 Aloha from Hawaii! Our group at MPI-INF (Dept. D2) is presenting four papers this year — including one Highlight. Brief overviews + links below 👇 1) Do It Yourself: Learning Semantic Correspondence from Pseudo-Labels (DIY-SC) A lightweight adapter on DINOv2 / SD+DINOv2 that reaches SOTA on SPair-71k without annotated keypoints. Authors: Olaf Dünkel, Thomas Wimmer, Christian Theobalt, Christian Rupprecht, Adam Kortylewski 🔗 Project: https://lnkd.in/e85rG4WM 🔗 Related post: https://lnkd.in/eQzSudPM 2) AIM (Highlight): Amending Inherent Interpretability via Self-Supervised Masking A simple, effective approach that encourages models to use genuine features over spurious ones—no extra annotations (only image labels). Authors: Eyad Alshami, Shashank Agnihotri, Bernt Schiele, Margret Keuper 🔗 Project: https://lnkd.in/e7mGA5HN 3) VITAL: More Understandable Feature Visualization through Distribution Alignment & Relevant Information Flow Reduces repetitive artifacts, improves interpretability, and scales to modern large-scale architectures. Authors: Ada Görgün, Bernt Schiele, Jonas Fischer 🔗 Project: https://lnkd.in/eH2cVxQ9 🔗 Post: https://lnkd.in/e8qRhitA 4) MVGBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-view Generation Models A fair, comparable suite for object reconstruction with emphasis on 3D consistency & image quality. Authors: Xianghui Xie, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll 🔗 Project: https://lnkd.in/e3M46-2p 🔗 X thread: https://lnkd.in/ehgNHg_B If you’re at ICCV, come say hi! 🤝 #ICCV2025 #ComputerVision #DeepLearning #Interpretability #RepresentationLearning #3D #Benchmarking #MPIINF

From October 2-4, Saarbrücken hosted the national celebrations for German Unity Day – and MPI for Informatics was happy to be part of it. At our booth, we presented exciting research projects alongside our partners from Saarland Informatics Campus, namely the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Universität des Saarlandes, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), and Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (LZI). We were happy to showcase projects from the Sensimotor Interaction Group, the Artificial Intelligence aided Design and Manufacturing Group (Oraclase), the Image Synthesis and Machine Learning Group, as well as the Graphics and Vision for Digital Humans Group. 📸 See some impressions from three days in Saarbrücken in the slide-show below. Max Planck Society

Director Christian Theobalt joins the new season of the Max Planck podcast “Ach, Mensch!” and talks about his research in Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence. In conversation with host Jessica Hughes, he shares insights into his work on 3D avatars and discusses how these advances could find applications not only in the film industry but also in medicine. “Ach, Mensch!” is produced by the Max Planck Society in collaboration with award-winning internet radio station detektor.fm, and explores in its new season how humans and machines interact, challenge, and redefine each other. ↪️ Find the episode here: https://sic.link/achmensch 📸 MPI-INF

An international research team from MPI for Informatics and TU Delft has detected more than 16,000 compromised servers using a subtle feature of the SSH authentication protocol. The team published their findings under the title “Catch-22: Uncovering Compromised Hosts using SSH Public Keys” at the USENIX Security Symposium 2025, where they won a Distinguished Paper Award as well as the prestigious Internet Defense Prize, which is sponsored by Meta and awarded by the USENIX Security Awards Comittee.🏅 By safely probing servers with public SSH keys previously seen in attacker operations, the team consisting of Munteanu Cristian, Tobias Fiebig and Anja Feldmann from MPI for Informatics and Georgios Smaragdakis from TU Delft was able to tell where those keys were authorized, strongly hinting at compromised systems. The result: thousands of compromised hosts across providers, enterprises, and academic networks were identified. In cooperation with the Shadowserver Foundation, it was made sure that network operators and national Computer Emergency Response Teams were responsibly notified of any breached systems; follow-up scans showed a clear decrease in compromised hosts. ↪️ Follow the Link to read more about the project: https://sic.link/catch22 📸 Cristian Munteanu Photo: MPI for Informatics/ Philipp Zapf-Schramm