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What we do

Image of a stylized graph-like brain, also some numbers.
Photo: Colourbox.de

We focus on research at the intersection of distributed systems and intelligent computing.
First, we do research in the systems area, particularly in the fields of parallel and distributed computing, computer networks, operating systems, and IT security, to build efficient, adaptive, resilient, usable, and secure systems that consist of interacting software components deployed on networked computers.
Second, we do research in the applications area, particularly in the fields of computational intelligence and machine learning, to build intelligent computing applications that learn from data to solve challenging computational real-world problems.

We anticipate that recent advances in computational power and network connectivity will lead to large-scale intelligent distributed systems that

  • (a) provide fast and effective access to enormous amounts of information
  • (b) transform this information into knowledge by integrating, combining, classifying, and analyzing it in novel ways using different paradigms of artificial intelligence (AI)
  • (c) facilitate computationally challenging and data-intensive intelligent computing applications that were hitherto impossible
  • (d) significantly improve our general understanding of learning and intelligence in natural and technical environments.

In this sense, distributed systems research is required to achieve major breakthroughs in AI, and AI research is required to significantly advance the functional and non-functional properties of distributed systems.

We often perform our work in interdisciplinary teams jointly with partners from different fields, such as biology, medicine, geoscience, physics, electrical engineering, economics, social science, law, arts and humanities, and media research. We helped to establish the recently founded Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence and are excited to support its mission of understanding the interplay of AI algorithms, AI systems, and synergies between artificial and natural intelligence to provide the foundation for AI transformation.