We are pleased to announce that Dr.-Ing. Phillip Rieger has received the 2026 Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the Association of Friends of TU Darmstadt for his dissertation “Training AI in Hostile Environments: Adversarially Robust Machine Learning.” The award recognizes outstanding dissertations across the faculties of TU Darmstadt.

In his thesis, Phillip investigates the security of machine learning systems in adversarial environments, with a particular focus on distributed learning approaches such as Federated Learning and Split Learning, which enable collaborative model training without sharing raw data. His research focuses on securing AI systems against manipulations by analyzing how adversarial behavior affects deep neural networks and their parameters in decentralized training settings. Based on these insights, he developed techniques that enable robust training even when data and computation are distributed across potentially untrusted participants.

Phillip conducted his research at the System Security Lab under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi.

More information about the award and the list of awardees can be found on the official page:

https://www.freunde.tu-darmstadt.de/fuerdietudarmstadt/preise_1/preiseverleihen/preistraeger_8/preistraeger_2026.de.jsp

Congratulations to Phillip on this well-deserved recognition!