News & Awards

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems News 14-02-2018 Best of luck - Start at Caltech Humboldt Fellow Dr. Zhiguang Wu leaves the group for Caltech and we wish him lots of success. He has already located the case that holds the micromotor that won Richard Feynman’s famous challenge. Zhiguang Wu Peer Fischer

Haptic Intelligence News 09-02-2018 NSERC Postdoc Fellowship for Hasti Seifi Dr. Hasti Seifi receives a prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the country´s federal funding agency for university-based research and student training in natural sciences and engineering. Hasti Seifi Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Physical Intelligence Award 01-02-2018 Abdon Pena-Francesch, Zoey Davidson, Ville Liimatainen, Xinghao Hu, Yubing Guo, and Utku Culha received the Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship.

Physical Intelligence News 25-01-2018 Millirobot with a talent for versatility of movement A magnetic drive allows a tiny untethered vehicle to walk, crawl, jump and swim through a complex environment Tiny robots need not fear obstacle courses in the future: Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have developed a minuscule, flexible robot that can master a variety of forms of movement. Its magnetic drive allows it to walk, crawl and roll through difficult terrain. Moreover, it can transport small loads and swim on and in liquids. In future, tiny robots moving in this way could transport medication specifically to where it is needed. Wenqi Hu Guo Zhan Lum Massimo Mastrangeli Metin Sitti

Physical Intelligence News 24-01-2018 Nature-inspired soft millirobot makes its way through enclosed spaces Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems invented a magnetically controlled soft robot only four millimeters in size, that can walk, crawl or roll through uneven terrain, carry cargo, climb onto the water surface, and even swim in it. The inspiration comes from soft-bodied beetle larvae and caterpillars, and even jellyfishes posed as biological models. One day, this small-scale robot may enable targeted drug delivery or minimally invasive surgery, the researchers hope. Its multiple locomotion capability in complex environments is so unique that science journal Nature will publish the researchers´ findings in its February edition. Metin Sitti Guo Zhan Lum Massimo Mastrangeli

Physical Intelligence Award 01-01-2018 Chang-Kyu Yoon joined Ewha Womans University as an assistant professor in S. Korea.

Physical Intelligence Award 01-01-2018 David Gracias received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel award from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation.

Physical Intelligence Award 01-01-2018 Guo Zhan Lum joined Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor in Singapore.

Physical Intelligence Award 01-01-2018 Hakan Ceylan, Immihan Ceren Yasa and Metin Sitti received the Science as Art Award of the Materials Research Society (MRS) in the Fall Meeting, Boston, USA.

Physical Intelligence Award 01-01-2018 Pelin Erkoç joined Bahcesehir University as an assistant professor in Turkey.

Physical Intelligence Award 01-01-2018 Sinan Özgün Demir received the Ministry of Education PhD fellowship from Turkey.

Award 22-12-2017 Samuel Sánchez: wins Catalan Research Award for Young Talent.

Haptic Intelligence Award 22-12-2017 Alexis E. Block is selected to participate in the HRI Pioneers 2018 Workshop Alexis Block

Empirical Inference News 19-12-2017 The Question is Why Algorithms learn a Sense of Fairness Only if Artificial Intelligence interprets and applies fairness in the same way as humans do, will society accept it. That is why scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen look at the causal reasoning behind data – because it matters how data comes about. Only when self-learning machines satisfy our ethical and legal requirements will the public accept them as just and fair. Niki Kilbertus

Empirical Inference News 14-12-2017 Bernhard Schölkopf receives Leibniz Prize 2018 Germany's most prestigious research funding prize - €2.5 million each for outstanding research work The latest recipients of Germany's most prestigious research funding prize have been announced. The Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) chose ten researchers, three women and seven men, to receive the 2018 Leibniz Prize. The prizes will be awarded on 19th March 2018 in Berlin. Bernhard Schölkopf Claudia Daefler

News 14-12-2017 MPI-IS and Carnegie Mellon University form joint PhD Program The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems together with the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, USA, initiate a joint PhD program starting in Spring 2018, aiming to strengthen the ties between these two leading research institutions in the field of Intelligent Systems. Already there is a strong collaboration between the MPI-IS and the CMU, as Dr. Metin Sitti, who initiated the partnership, is both a Director at the MPI-IS and a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at CMU. Metin Sitti

Empirical Inference Award 11-12-2017 Bernhard Schölkopf: ACM Fellow for contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning.

Empirical Inference News 11-12-2017 Bernhard Schölkopf elected ACM Fellow (2017) for his contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning ACM's most prestigious member grade recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Bernhard Schölkopf

Haptic Intelligence News 11-12-2017 Feeling the Virtual World Dr. Katherine Kuchenbecker on the Future of Haptics Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Empirical Inference News 27-11-2017 Artificial Intelligence to the rescue in finishing off Fake News An algorithm jointly developed by researchers of the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and for Software Systems in Kaiserslautern promises to optimize which doubtful news stories to send for fact checking and when to do so, helping to prevent fake news from spreading on Social Media. Manuel Gomez Rodriguez

Dynamic Locomotion News 30-10-2017 Open PhD research position [This position is now closed] Open PhD research position in mechatronic design of legged robots for locomotion research. Alexander Badri-Spröwitz

Dynamic Locomotion News 29-10-2017 Talk at SWARM 2017 workshop Talk at SWARM 2017 Alexander Badri-Spröwitz

Probabilistic Numerics News 27-10-2017 Philipp Hennig receives prestigious ERC Starting Grant Project Title PANAMA Max Planck Research Group Leader Philipp Hennig will use the five-year funding with a total of 1.45 million Euros for his “Probabilistic Automated Numerical Analysis in Machine learning and Artificial intelligence (PANAMA)” project. Philipp Hennig

Empirical Inference News 26-10-2017 From small to not so pixel-perfect large The Algorithm EnhanceNet-PAT is OK not being perfect – but shows a better result (Talk at ICCV 2017, Venice) Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen utilize the Artificial Intelligence of a software to create a high definition version of a low resolution image. While the pixel-perfectness is being sacrificed, the reward is a better result. Bernhard Schölkopf Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi Michael Hirsch Claudia Daefler

News 25-10-2017 World´s smallest jet engine invented in Stuttgart For the second time, Dr. Samuel Sánchez from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart receives the Guinness World Record for the smallest nanotube travelling through fluid like a jet engine. Sámuel Sánchez

News 23-10-2017 Amazon to join Cyber Valley The technology company is supporting the research collaboration on AI initiated by the Max Planck Society Cyber Valley has attracted another collaboration partner from industry. In future, Amazon intends to participate in the research collaboration initiated by the Max Planck Society in December 2016 which is one of the biggest projects in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe. In addition to its commitment to Cyber Valley, Amazon is also setting up its own research center adjacent to the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and will step up collaboration with the Max Planck Society. “We appreciate Amazon’s commitment in the Cyber Valley and to research on artificial intelligence,” remarked Max Planck President Martin Stratmann. “We gain another strong cooperation partner who will further increase the international significance of research in the area of machine learning and computer vision in the Stuttgart and Tübingen region.” Michael Black Bernhard Schölkopf Claudia Daefler

Perceiving Systems Autonomous Vision Award 12-10-2017 Andreas Geiger with collaborators from Daimler and Freiburg won the best student paper award at 3DV for the paper "Sparsity Invariant CNNs"

Autonomous Vision News 12-10-2017 Andreas GTC Europe talk on Deep Models for 3D Reconstruction Andreas GTC Europe talk on Deep Models for 3D Reconstruction is now available.

Perceiving Systems Autonomous Vision News 12-10-2017 Best student paper award at 3DV 2017 Best student paper award at the International Conference on 3D Vision (3D 2017) for the paper "Sparsity Invariant CNNs" for Andreas Geiger and collaborators from Daimler R&D and Freiburg University. Andreas Geiger

Autonomous Motion News 11-10-2017 Jeannette Bohg is a woman in robotics you should know about! Robohub 2017 list of 25 women in Robotics you need to know about On the occasion of Ada Lovelace Day on 10 October 2017, robohub presented their annual list of “25 women in robotics you need to know about”. Recently, Jeannette Bohg became Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Stanford. She is Guest Researcher at the Autonomous Motion Department of MPI, where she did her research on robotics between 2012 and 2017. Congratulations! Jeannette Bohg

News 29-09-2017 Funded Ph.D. Positions at the New International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen are collaborating to offer a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems. This new doctoral program will be accepting its new generation of Ph.D. students in Spring 2018 and will enroll about 100 Ph.D. students over the next six years. Leila Masri

News 28-09-2017 PhD Fellowships at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems The Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems is a joint research center of ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Society. The Center’s mission is to pursue research in the design and analysis of learning systems, synthetic or natural. This initiative brings together more than 40 professors and senior researchers in the fields of machine learning, perception, robotics on large and small scales, as well as neuroscience.

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems Award 20-09-2017 Eunjin Choi and Hyeon-Ho Jeong, respectively, received the 2017 scholarship awards from the Korean Scientists and Engineers Association in the FRG (VeKNI e.V).

News 18-09-2017 The Three Pillars of Fully Autonomous Driving 2017 Max Planck Lecture by Professor Amnon Shashua The field of transportation is undergoing a seismic change with the coming introduction of autonomous driving. The technologies required to enable computer driven cars involves the latest cutting edge artificial intelligence algorithms along three major thrusts: Sensing, Planning and Mapping.

Haptic Intelligence News 15-09-2017 A Balanced Equation - Women in STEM Roadtrip Breakthroughs come from breaking down barriers. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Autonomous Vision Award 12-09-2017 Andreas Geiger wins the German Pattern Recognition Award 2017.

Perceiving Systems Autonomous Vision News 12-09-2017 Andreas Geiger wins German Pattern Recognition Award 2017 The German Pattern Recognition Award is awarded once a year to one young researcher in computer vision, pattern recognition or machine learning at an age of 35 years or less and sponsored by the Daimler AG with 5000€. Andreas Geiger

Probabilistic Numerics Award 11-09-2017 Philipp Hennig: ERC Starting Grant (Acronym: PANAMA)

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems Award 06-09-2017 Peer Fischer is named Steinhofer lecturer at the University of Freiburg and he receives the associated prize of the Steinhofer-Foundation.

Autonomous Vision News 04-09-2017 Andreas Geiger's tutorial talk at BMVC 2017 on Probabilistic and Deep Models for 3D Reconstruction 3D reconstruction from multiple 2D images is an inherently ill-posed problem. Prior knowledge is required to resolve ambiguities and probabilistic models are desirable to capture the ambiguities in the reconstructed model. In this talk, I will present two recent results tackling these two aspects. First, I will introduce a probabilistic framework for volumetric 3D reconstruction where the reconstruction problem is cast as inference in a Markov random field using ray potentials. Our main contribution is a discrete-continuous inference algorithm which computes marginal distributions of each voxel's occupancy and appearance. I will show that the proposed algorithm allows for Bayes optimal predictions with respect to a natural reconstruction loss. I will further demonstrate several extensions which integrate non-local CAD priors into the reconstruction process. In the second part of my talk, I will present a novel framework for deep learning with 3D data called OctNet which enables 3D CNNs on high-dimensional inputs. I will demonstrate the utility of the OctNet representation on several 3D tasks including classification, orientation estimation and point cloud labeling. Finally, I will present an extension of OctNet called OctNetFusion which jointly predicts the space partitioning function with the output representation, resulting in an end-to-end trainable model for volumetric depth map fusion. Andreas Geiger

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems News 25-08-2017 International Conference on Micro and Nanomachines The 2017 International conference on micro- and nanomachines will be held in Wuhan, China, from the 25-28 August and will be co-chaired by Peer Fischer Peer Fischer

Perceiving Systems Autonomous Vision News 22-08-2017 NVIDIA CEO presenting the brand new Tesla V100 GPUs at CVPR. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang presented the NVAIL AI Labs with the very first Tesla V100 GPUs, based on NVIDIA's Volta architecture. MPI-IS is among the top centers working at the leading edge of deep learning in computer vision. As such it is recognized by NVIDIA as one of its NVAIL labs and giving the MPI access to the best and latest NVIDIA technology. Huang unveiled these new GPUs at CVPR saying that he wants to put them in the hands of researchers first. Michael Black Andreas Geiger

Empirical Inference Award 06-08-2017 Matej Balog, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Zoubin Ghahramani, Adrian Weller: Honorable Mentions at ICML 2017 for their paper: "Lost Relatives of the Gumbel Trick".

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems News 02-08-2017 Steinhofer lecture Peer Fischer, head of the Research Group "Micro-, Nano- and Molecular Systems" at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart, was awarded with a Steinhofer lecture 2017 of the University of Freiburg "for his fundamental work in the field of targeted 3D-production of artificial nanostructures and their application in biomedicine". Professor Fischer gave his lecture on "How to Teach Nanoparticles and Enzymes to Swim". Peer Fischer

Perceiving Systems News 01-08-2017 4D Movies Capture People in Clothing, Creating Realistic Virtual Try-on Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have developed technology to digitally capture clothing on moving people, turn it into a 3D digital form, and dress virtual avatars with it. This new technology makes virtual clothing try-on practical. Gerard Pons-Moll Sergi Pujades Michael Black

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems News 01-08-2017 Faculty position Congrats and good luck to Dr. Vijay Chikkadi who will start his own group this summer as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science Education Research (IISER) Pune. Chikkadi kudleppa

Haptic Intelligence News 28-07-2017 Can You Feel Me Now? The Science Of Digitizing Touch Scientists are developing tools that allow you to digitally feel textures like wood and cotton. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Micro, Nano, and Molecular Systems Award 27-07-2017 Tian Qiu, Stefano Palagi, and Fabian Adams win the Best Oral Paper Award, at the 10th Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, London 2017.

Perceiving Systems Award 26-07-2017 Siyu Tang: Winner of the CVPR 2017 Multi-Object Tracking Challenge

Perceiving Systems Award 19-07-2017 Varun Jampani, Osman Ulusoy, and Silvia Zuffi. Outstanding Reviewer Award. CVPR 2017.

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