Max Planck Institute for Informatics
The Max Planck Institute for Informatics (German: Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, abbreviated MPI-INF or MPII) is a research institute in computer science with a focus on algorithms and their applications in a broad sense. It hosts fundamental research (algorithms and complexity, programming logics) as well a research for various application domains (computer graphics, geometric computation, constraint solving, computational biology). It is part of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Germany's largest society for fundamental research.
The research institutes of the Max Planck Society have a national and international reputation as “Centres of Excellence” for pure research.
The institute consists of five departments and two research groups:
- The Algorithms and Complexity Department is headed by Prof. Dr. Kurt Mehlhorn,
- The Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing Department is headed by Prof. Dr. Bernt Schiele,
- The Department Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics is headed by Prof. Dr. Thomas Lengauer, Ph.D.
- The Computer Graphics Department is headed by Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Seidel
- The Databases and Information Systems Department is headed by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum
- Research Group Automation of Logic is headed by Prof. Dr. Christoph Weidenbach
- The Independent Research Group Computational Genomics and Epidemiology is headed by Dr. Alice McHardy.
Previously, it included the following departments:
- The Programming Logics Department was headed by Prof. Dr. Harald Ganzinger († June 3, 2004)
Members of the institute have received various awards. Professor Kurt Mehlhorn (in 1986) and Professor Hans-Peter Seidel (in 2003) received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Professor Kurt Mehlhorn (in 1995) and Professor Thomas Lengauer (in 2003) received the Konrad-Zuse-Medal, and in 2004 Professor Harald Ganzinger received the Herbrand Award.
The institute, along with the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the entire Computer Science department of Saarland University, is involved in the Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum für Informatik.
The International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (IMPRS-CS) is the graduate school of the MPII and the MPI-SWS. It was founded in 2000 and offers a fully funded PhD-Program in cooperation with Saarland University. Dean is Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum.
See also
- Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
- YAGO (database) (developed at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science)