News Archive 2011

B-IT Media Informatics student X. Jiang is one of the three winners who will spend a fully funded half-year internship at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, Japan, in 2012.

Research Schools of North Rhine Westphalia award the "Young Scientist Award" to young academics who have released successfully an excellent scientific publication before obtaining their Master's Degree.

In 2011 there are seven laureates. The prize of B-IT Research School was awarded to Steffen Kirchhoff who is currently carrying out his PhD thesis under the supervision of Professor Thomas Seidl, RWTH Aachen. Mr Kirchhoff received the "Young Scientist Award" for his excellent work in the field of similarity search in photos and videos. This is supposed to substantially improve results of search engines in the future.

From left to right: Dr. Beate Wieland (Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research North Rhine-Westphalia), Steffen Kirchhoff (awardee) and Professor Dr. Matthias Jarke (Director of B-IT Research School)

Kathrin Heikamp, an alumna of the B-IT Life Science Informatics program and a research assistant in the group of Professor Bajorath, has received the Best Poster Award at the 7th German Conference on Chemoinformatics, held in Goslar, November 6-8, 2011.

Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots being developed today will increasingly touch people and their lives, in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, manufacturing, personal health care, and assistance.

Professor Oussama Khatib, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University, is working in this scientific field of massively increasing interest. He received several high distinctions, the latest among them are the Japan Robot Association Award and the IEEE RAS (Robotics and Automation Society) Pioneer Award for Robotics and Automation in 2010 for his fundamental pioneering contributions in robotics research, visionary leadership, and life-long commitment to the field

Read more ...

A One-Day Symposium "The ABC of Life Science Informatics" will held at B-IT on November 25th, 2011, following the successful events of the previous years. The gathering is aimed a bringing together research groups from academia and industry working in the fields of bioinformatics and chemoinformatics in the Aachen-Bonn- Cologne region (the ABC-region).

The "The ABC of Life Science Informatics" is the fourth of its kind. The previous ones were successfully held in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Its enormous success leads to a repeat: "The ABC of Life Science Informatics" gathering on November 25, 2011. B-IT gladly provides the platform for this exchange of ideas.

Read more about the scientific programme...

Dr. Ye Hu, an alumna of the B-IT Master program of Life Science Informatics, and Dr. Britta Nisius who successfully completed their Ph.D. degrees in Computational Life Sciences in 2011 under Professor Bajorath at the B-IT are recipients of the "Bayer Promotionspreis", an award for excellent dissertations sponsored by Bayer Healthcare Company.

B-IT group of Computer Security, headed by B-IT professor Joachim von zur Gathen, will present an exhibit of visual cryptography, called "Visky", at Museum König, Adenauerallee 160 53113 Bonn. Visual cryptography is a possibility to encrypt pictures. Based on the one-time pad it offers a provably, completely secure way to transmit secrets. Despite it's seeming toy-nature there are serious applications for example for electronic voting in the mean-time. Check this area of cryptography out at the Germany Unity Day! Learn more with staff members of B-IT Computer Security Group about recent and future applications of visual cryptography. More information about the event can be found at: www.bonn2011.de

Opening Hours for the exhibit "Visky":

1 October 2011: 12:00 - 18:00 hours

2 October 2011: 10:00 - 18:00 hours

3 October 2011: 10:00 - 18:00 hours

The celebrations of the Germany Unity Day and the North Rhine Westphalia Day (NRW Day) will be held in Bonn from October 1 to October 3, 2011. B-IT Partner Fraunhofer will present interesting and innovative exhibits at B-IT building at this occasion. You are welcome to visit them! All exhibits will be presented in the ground floor and the lower entrance hall of B-IT building. B-IT is found at the "Avenue of Innovation" (Weg der Innovation). More information about the event can be found at: www.bonn2011.de

Opening hours:

1 October 2011: 14:00 - 20:00 hours

2 October 2011: 11:00 - 20:00 hours

3 October 2011: 11:00 - 18:00 hours

Stephan Günnemann, Brigitte Boden and Thomas Seidl received the ECML PKDD 2011 Best Paper Award in Data Mining for the paper "DB-CSC: A density-based approach for subspace clustering in graphs with feature vectors" presented in the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2011), held September 5-9, 2011 in Athens, Greece.

On July 19, 2011, B-IT Media Informatics Alumnus Fahad Aijaz (M.Sc. 2006) defended his doctoral dissertation at RWTH Aachen University with the highest grade of "summa cum laude" (with distinction). His thesis "Mobile Server Platform" was developed within the UMIC Excellence Cluster at RWTH Aachen and was supervised by Professor Bernhard Walke (Communications Networks) and co-supervised by Professor Matthias Jarke (Information Systems). One interesting prototypical application of this research, the "Social Network in the Pocket (SNiP)", demonstrates many of the advanced social network facilities such as live chats, friendship networks, picture gallery, locate&track, voice messaging and video streaming but, unlike the currently dominating products such as Facebook or StudiVZ, keeps all the data on your own mobile or stationary devices under full control, thus maintaining full data ownership and privacy. In 2010, SNiP was awarded 4th prize among over 120 entries in the worldwide Ericsson mobile applications competition after tests with thousand users.

Sebastian Thrun, Professor at Stanford University, will receive this year's prestigious Max-Planck Research Award. He will be giving a talk on "Self Driving Cars" in the B-IT lecture hall on July 19, 2011 at 18:00 hours. Professor Thrun created, together with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL), an autonomous vehicle that won the DARPA Grand challenge, a competition of driverless vehicles, in 2005.

More information about the lecturer and his work...

All visitors to this lecture are kindly reminded that parking on the B-IT grounds is limited.

Ms. Shanshan Zhang, a graduate from the Tongji University in Shanghai, has been awarded the highly coveted and prestigious scholarship from the China Scholarship Council to enable her to pursue her PhD under the supervision of Professor Cremers at B-IT. Ms. Zhang was selected after successfully passing the extremely competitive academic evaluation process of the China Scholarship Council. She plans to arrive in Bonn at the beginning of August 2011.

Ms. Ye Hu graduated with a MSc. in Life Science Informatics in September 2008 and is now in the process of completing her PhD with Professor Bajorath. The China Scholarship Council recently informed Professor Bajorath that Ms. Hu has been honoured with the above-mentioned award due to her outstanding academic performance throughout her study abroad at B-IT and has expressed their grateful appreciation and congratulations for his ongoing academic support and supervision of Ms. Hu.

The B-IT group for Computer Security (cosec), headed by B-IT Professor Joachim von zur Gathen, explored advanced teaching methods. The students had the opportunity to dive into the interesting world of mobile security, as well as gathering first hand experience of academic life. They prepared research quality papers for a master-level seminar. The student presentations were held in a research conference style at the end of the winter semester 2010/11. Due to the excellent quality of the papers, the group decided to invite external guests to attend the two-day event. The guests were impressed by the high quality of student presentations and are looking forward to attend other events of this type.