User Group: Wissenschaftler:innen

Like last year, Cyber Valley partner institutions successfully submitted 23 scientific articles to the ICML. The conference, held this year in Baltimore, USA, began on July 17 and continues through July 23.

“Our enduring presence at leading global conferences such as ICML is not only a testament to the quality of research at Cyber Valley partner institutions, but also that we have established ourselves broadly at the international level,” says Philipp Hennig, professor of machine learning methods at the University of Tübingen and deputy speaker of the Cyber Valley Executive Board.

Since Cyber Valley was founded at the end of 2016, the dynamic AI ecosystem in the Stuttgart/Tübingen region has consistently gained momentum in the fields of machine learning, robotics, and computer vision. In addition to attracting world-class senior scientists, Cyber Valley’s graduate programs have quickly gained a solid international reputation among young researchers in the field of modern AI.

A full list of papers and authors is available below.

“Being accepted into the program allows me to sharpen my scientific profile in a more technically oriented direction and to expand my professional network in disciplinary terms,” says Wirzberger. She had already taken this path in 2018 as a post-doctoral researcher by moving to the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. There, the cognitive psychologist led the development of AI-supported software for training attentional control. In 2020, she moved to the University of Stuttgart, where Wirzberger heads the Department of Teaching and Learning with Intelligent Systems as well as serving as spokesperson for the Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems (IRIS) and is in charge of the “Platform of Reflection” of the Data-Integrated Simulation Science (SimTech) Cluster of Excellence.

Networking the disciplines

Interdisciplinary networking has always played an important role for Wirzberger. Already in her master’s studies at the Technical University of Berlin, she decided against a classic master’s program in psychology with “Human Factors”. “In my bachelor’s thesis, I realized how much I enjoy programming and how exciting issues at the interface between humans and technology are. That’s why I wanted to develop further in this direction,” says Wirzberger. As a doctoral student in the DFG Research Training Group “CrossWorlds” at Chemnitz University of Technology, she worked closely with colleagues from the faculty of Computer Science.

Mentoring as an important building block

When it comes to networking, mentoring also plays an important role for Wirzberger. Particularly in cross-disciplinary mentoring programs, she sees the opportunity to benefit from the exchange with established colleagues and thereby also develop further in her role as a leader.

For Wirzberger, admission to the Elisabeth Schiemann Kolleg is therefore an important step in strategically advancing both her own professionalization and her vision for the development of adaptive educational technologies.

Contact

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Maria Wirzberger
Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems
maria.wirzberger@iris.uni-stuttgart.de
https://www.iris.uni-stuttgart.de/

Vision is one of the most important senses for many animals as well as for humans. However, the retina of the eye, which is also called the retina, has not been fully explored to date. The amacrine cells in particular still puzzle researchers. These special nerve cells are cross-connected with the other nerve cell layers of the retina and form the main class of inhibitory cells. More than 60 types of amacrine cells are now known from the mouse retina – they differ, for example, in their appearance, function and circuitry. They are particularly challenging for modeling because their activity is difficult to measure and their function can only be inferred from their interconnection in the network.
 
To better understand their role, Philipp Berens and his team are developing a new type of model in their ERC project “Next generation mechanistic models of retinal interneurons” (NextMechMod). Models have always played an important role in the history of research on information processing in the nervous system. Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1963 for their biophysical model of ionic currents during excitation and inhibition at the nerve cell membrane, presented in 1952. This model, while very detailed, is difficult to fit to measured data. This is easier for statistical models, but these lack the relationship to biological reality.
 
To capitalize on their respective strengths, Berens aims to develop a new generation of hybrid mechanistic model that combines the different model levels. To do this, he is taking advantage of the latest advances in machine learning and “computational neuroscience”. His team is working closely with collaborators to make the models realistic with data obtained from imaging techniques and with methods from genetics. In doing so, he hopes to develop a toolbox to decipher the role of amacrine cells during the natural processing of visual information. A better understanding of the functions of the healthy eye can form the basis for new therapies for eye diseases.
 
Philipp Berens studied bioinformatics and philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where he also received his PhD in 2013. After spending time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, he joined the Tübingen Institute for Ophthalmic Research as a research group leader in 2016. There, he was appointed in 2018 to a Heisenberg Professorship for “Data Science for Vision Research” funded by the German Research Foundation. Together with Professor Ulrike von Luxburg, Philipp Berens heads the Cluster of Excellence “Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science”. He is a member of the Tübingen AI Center.

“Our constant success at major conferences like CVPR shows how well-established the Cyber Valley research community is on the international level”, says Michael J. Black, Cyber Valley spokesperson and Director at the MPI-IS, where he heads the Perceiving Systems Department. CVPR 2022 will take place from June 19 to June 24 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, with both in-person and virtual attendance options.

Since Cyber Valley was founded at the end of 2016, the dynamic AI ecosystem in the Stuttgart/Tübingen region has consistently gained momentum in the fields of machine learning, robotics, and computer vision. In addition to attracting world-class senior scientists, Cyber Valley’s graduate programs have quickly gained a solid international reputation among young researchers in the field of modern AI.

A full list of papers and authors is available below.