Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern site

The cooperation strengthens application-related research on artificial intelligence in Germany

Rupak Majumdar, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern, develops mathematical methods for ensuring the reliability of networked systems.

Artificial intelligence has the power to support people in an ever-increasing number of areas – including education. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems are working under Adish Singla’s leadership to find methods to help children learn how to program. These algorithms can, however, also be used in other areas.

Fighting fake news in social media more efficiently and accurately: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems combines artificial intelligence techniques and human judgments to design an early alert system for fake news.

We have barely any control over where information about us and even photos bearing our likeness are displayed. In the future, however, it may at least be possible to prevent ourselves from appearing as bystanders in photos on other people’s Facebook pages. This is thanks to technology developed by a team working under Paarijaat Aditya, Rijurekha Sen and Peter Druschel from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

Cyber-physical systems are in strong demand for their ability to increase road traffic safety and optimize electricity consumption from renewable sources. They link vehicles to sensors that monitor traffic and order the car to brake if a dangerous situation arises, for example. Or they distribute electricity from multiple power plants to consumers as efficiently as possible. Rupak Majumdar, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern, develops mathematical methods for ensuring the reliability of these networked systems.

Data is the raw material of the modern information society. All too often, however, companies that require comprehensive data analyses risk breaching data protection guidelines. Paul Francis, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern, seeks to strike a balance between these conflicting interests. His company, Aircloak, plays an important role in this endeavor.

When a computer takes forever to load a website, it may be annoying, but it is nothing more serious than that. If, however, the electronics in a car or a plane don’t process commands exactly when they are supposed to, the consequences can be fatal. Björn Brandenburg and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken study how to construct real-time systems in such a way that it can be proven that they always react on time.

Asynchronous Programming is a paradigm that is often used in low-level system software, web programming, and user applications on mobile platforms. However, these programs are difficult for a programmer to write correctly. This means we need software tools for verification, which can automatically establish correctness of such programs or exhibit faulty executions. In a recent project on verification of asynchronous programs, we have found a new approach that permits the automatic verification of a large variety of asynchronous programs. 

Approximations permeate our computing systems. They help to save computing resources such as time and energy, but they also necessarily introduce errors. How do these errors affect the overall correctness of our computations? To handle the complexity of today's computer programs, we need to develop tools, which automatically analyze the effects of approximation errors and thus help engineers to write correct and efficient code.

The Web has become a vast repository of information and knowledge about a wide range of topics and real-world events. There are a growing number of sites, ranging from question answering sites and online communities to microblogs, where knowledge is crowdsourced and it also the crowd who curates the contributed knowledge.  These sites also contain an ever-growing number of unverified stories of questionable origin. There is a growing need for computational methods to understand, predict and enhance the creation, consumption and dissemination of trustworthy knowledge.

Social computing systems refer to an emerging class of societal-scale human-computer systems. Examples include social networking sites like Facebook and Google Plus, blogging and microblogging sites like Twitter and LiveJournal, anonymous social media sites like Whisper and 4chan, content sharing sites like YouTube and Instagram, social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Pinterest, crowdsourced opinion sites like Yelp and eBay seller ratings, and social peer production sites like Wikipedia and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Computers permeate all modern technologies: they monitor, they control, they decide. If everything goes as planned, they keep cars on the road and unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. But what happens if something goes wrong? What if the ever-present computers, so called cyber-physical systems, are erroneous? To ensure that future technologies remain safe and trustworthy despite the pervasive use of embedded computers, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems develop the foundations for provably correct cyber-physical systems.