Interview with Prof Dr Dr h.c. Ralf Steinmetz before his retirement

After 28 years at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Professor Ralf Steinmetz is retiring. Until the end of the special research centre ‘MAKI – Multi-Mechanism Adaptation for the Future Internet’, he has agreed to take on all tasks as its spokesperson. In this interview, the head of the Multimedia Communication Lab at the etit Department and Member of courtesy at the Computer Science Department looks back on this time. He talks about challenges and his grand vision, provides insights into how the collaboration between different researchers and different technical communication systems has been successful – and reveals how research and teaching can continue to be successfully organised in the future.

AI and NLP for Mental Health

Dr Shaoxiong Ji has headed the new Independent Research Group (IRG) ‘AI and NLP for Mental Health’ since October. The group is funded as part of the LOEWE centre DYNAMIC and works closely with the UKP group. After completing his PhD at Aalto University, Ji worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in the field of high-performance language technology. Learn more about Ji and his research in the following interview.

An interview with Professor Kristian Kersting and Professor Markus Rohrbach, co-speakers of the RAI cluster project

The research initiative „Reasonable Artificial Intelligence’ (RAI) is one of three projects involving TU Darmstadt that are in the running for a Cluster of Excellence. Professor Kersting and Professor Rohrbach give an insight into their research – and explain who could benefit from it in the future. Part two of a three-part video series on TU Darmstadt's Cluster of Excellence applications.

ENCRYPTO lab presents research

On Monday (16 September), members of the Hessian state parliament Lucas Schmitz (spokesman for science and the arts) and Peter Franz (member of parliament for the Darmstadt II constituency; both CDU) were guests at TU Darmstadt.

LOEWE Center emergenCity develops important addition to existing warning system

As part of the warning day organised by the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), the LOEWE centre ‘emergenCITY’ is looking into the question of how the population can be warned in the event of a prolonged power outage. The idea is to integrate the good old advertising column into the warning system.

Award for outstanding contributions by young researchers in the fields of pattern recognition, machine vision and machine learning

TU Professor Justus Thies was awarded the German Pattern Recognition Prize at this year's GCPR-VMV conference in Munich.

ERC supports TU professor Justus Thies with Starting Grant

TU professor Justus Thies is receiving a Starting Grant totalling 1.5 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project ‘Learning Digital Humans in Motion’. The exciting research goal: to develop AI-based image processing and graphic tools to create lifelike digital representations of people for the immersive digital world.

TU professor Georgia Chalvatzaki receives ERC Starting Grant for her project SIREN

The “SIREN” research project at TU Darmstadt has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Professor Georgia Chalvatzaki will receive around 1.5 million euros of funding for five years. The computer scientist is researching innovative AI robot software architectures, which enable human-like robots to perform challenging tasks in unstructured and dynamic environments.

Mobile Human-Computer Interaction

How do we want to organise our future mobile interaction with information?

From 28 to 30 August, more than 150 scientists will come together for the International Conference on Resilient Systems (ICRS) at the CREATE Tower in Singapore. The ICRS is one of the leading interdisciplinary conferences in resilience research. For the first time, it will also be co-organised by emergenCITY representatives. The LOEWE centre emergenCITY is an interdisciplinary and cross-location cooperation under the leadership of TU Darmstadt.

TU Darmstadt part of new lab with Aleph Alpha

TU Darmstadt is establishing a joint laboratory with Aleph Alpha Research, the research arm of the Heidelberg-based AI company Aleph Alpha. The aim of ‘Lab 1141’ is to further develop safe and transparent generative artificial intelligence (AI). The collaboration is intended to close gaps between academic research and industrial development.

Study led by the UKP lab shows limitations of ChatGPT & co.

According to a new study led by TU Darmstadt, AI models such as ChatGPT are apparently less capable of learning independently than previously assumed. According to the study, there is no evidence that what are known as large language models (LLMs) are beginning to develop a general “intelligent” behaviour that would enable them to proceed in a planned or intuitive manner or to think in a complex way. The study will be presented in August at the annual conference of the renowned Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in Bangkok, the largest international conference on automatic language processing.

Successful participation in renowned conference

Researchers from the “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI) project took part in this year's “Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition” (CVPR) and successfully presented the results of their work in workshops and conference papers. “RAI” is in the running for a Cluster of Excellence in the prestigious Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments.

The Department mourns the loss of a first-time member

It is with great regret that we bid farewell to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans-Jürgen Hoffmann who passed away on July 7th at the age of 89.

AIML research team presents innovative safety tool “LlavaGuard”

Researchers at the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab (AIML) in the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt and the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.AI) have developed a method that uses vision language models to filter, evaluate, and suppress specific image content in large datasets or from image generators. The research is part of the “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence (RAI)” cluster project, which has submitted a full application to the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments for the “Clusters of Excellence” funding line.