MPI-SWS has recently become a partner of the Max Planck School of Biomedical Artificial Intelligence, a new graduate school developing advanced AI methods for basic life sciences research. The school's focus will be on deepening understanding of biological systems by combining modern biomedical technologies with innovative approaches to artificial intelligence. The aim is to train a new generation of scientists who will develop algorithms that can learn, explain, and predict the principles of living systems and use these findings for molecular design.

The fellows of the school are internationally recognized researchers from 24 institutions -- including 14 Max Planck Institutes -- who come from a wide variety of fields, ranging from image and speech processing to immunology. From MPI-SWS, Krishna Gummadi, head of the Networked Systems research group, has been named a fellow of the newly founded graduate school.

The spokesperson of the new school is Karsten Borgwardt, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, where the administration of the school will also be located. The new School will be financed under the funding agreement between the Max Planck Society and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, as well as through contributions from the participating institutions.

The plan is to accept the first applications for doctoral positions at the school starting in fall 2026, with the first BMAI cohort beginning their doctoral studies in fall 2027.

About the Max Planck Schools

Since 2019, the Max Planck Schools are offering a visionary graduate program to exceptional PhD candidates. The faculties of each School unite the best scholars in their field to teach and work with highly motivated doctoral candidates, all embedded in a unique network spanning across universities and non-university research organizations. The Max Planck Schools are looking for highly talented applicants with Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees from all over the world, aiming to further develop their research skills and network in one of the most innovative graduate programs in Germany.

Further information:

Announcement by the Max Planck Society:  https://www.mpg.de/26250857/max-planck-school-of-biomedical-artificial-intelligence

Announcement by the Max Planck Schools: https://www.maxplanckschools.org/de/news-events/start-der-max-planck-school-of-biomedical-artificial-intelligence

The Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School 2026 https://cmmrs.mpi-sws.org

August 3–7, 2026 Saarbruecken, Germany

Applications are requested from undergraduate students or Master’s students in computer and information science, computer engineering, or a related discipline to the 10th annual Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School.

The small, select group of attendees will be exposed to state-of-the-art research in computer science, have the opportunity to interact one-on-one with internationally leading scientists from three of the foremost academic institutions in research and higher learning in the US and in Europe, and network with like-minded students. They will get a sense of what it is like to pursue an academic or an industrial research career in computer science and have a head start when applying for graduate school.

For full consideration, applications should be received by February 14, 2026 AOE. Travel and accommodation will be covered for accepted students. Further information about the school and how to apply can be found at https://cmmrs.mpi-sws.org

As part of our periodic evolution and development, MPI-SWS organized an (in-person) symposium on research topics of emerging interest in the broad area of software systems. We invited six top researchers from around the world to participate: Natacha Crooks (UC Berkeley), Alexandra Silva (Cornell University), Maria Christakis (TU Wien), Stefanie Jegelka (TU Munich), Zeynep Akata (Helmholtz Munich & TU Munich), and Elissa Redmiles (Georgetown University).

The MPI-SWS Research Symposium took place at MPI-SWS on June 10 and 11: at the Saarbrücken site on June 10, and at the Kaiserslautern site on June 11.

The full schedule can be found here: https://research-symposium-2025.mpi-sws.org/

Outstanding undergraduate and Masters students are invited to apply to the 9th annual Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School. Applications are requested from students in computer and information science, computer engineering, or a related discipline.  The 9th edition of this annual series of week-long schools will focus on emerging research trends in computer science.

The small, select group of attendees will be exposed to state-of-the-art research in computer science, have the opportunity to interact one-on-one with internationally leading scientists from three of the foremost academic institutions in research and higher learning in the US and in Europe, and network with like-minded students. They will get a sense of what it is like to pursue an academic or an industrial research career in computer science and have a head start when applying for graduate school.

For full consideration, applications should be received by February 15, 2025 AOE. Travel and accommodation will be covered for accepted students.

Further information about the school and how to apply can be found at https://cmmrs.mpi-sws.org

Open Diffix is an MPI-SWS-supported open software project to develop strong but usable data anonymization. Open Diffix is built on the data anonymization technology Diffix, which has been developed in a research partnership between the group of Paul Francis and Aircloak GmbH. Open Diffix recently released its first tool, "Diffix for Desktop". Designed with extreme ease-of-use in mind, Diffix for Desktop can be used by non-experts to safely release sensitive data to the public. Diffix for Desktop frees users from concerns about anonymity, allowing them to focus on data quality.

Last week MPI-SWS hosted the 3rd annual Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School (CMMRS). This one-week school is designed to give undergraduate and Masters students from around the world a quick taste of what it is like to be a computer scientist! The school provides in-depth lectures on selected, state-of-the-art research topics and the opportunity to interact with leading academic and industry researchers, as well as current graduate students. The school also includes broader information sessions on pursuing a doctorate and on life as a computer scientist, thus providing students a head start for their research careers.

This year's school welcomed 75 pre-doctoral students from 22 countries. Students heard lectures from some of the top researchers in CS:

• Leilani Battle, University of Maryland, Introduction to Data Visualization
• Dave Levin, University of Maryland, Measuring and Improving the Web’s Public Key Infrastructure
• Rupak Majumdar, MPI-SWS, Random Testing with Theoretical Guarantees
• Adrian Sampson, Cornell University, Designing Programming Languages for Heterogeneous Hardware
• Fred Schneider, Cornell University, Isolation and Flow of Information
• Adish Singla, MPI-SWS, Machine Teaching

The informal feedback from attendees and guests this year was overwhelmingly positive.

In addition to the scientific program, the school's program included several fun social events, where students bonded and networked with other like-minded peers.

The school was generously sponsored by the NSF, the Max Planck Society, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Nokia Bell Labs.

More information can be found on the CMMRS 2019 website.

We have launched the Open GDA Score Project at www.gda-score.org.  This is an open project to develop a set of tools and databases to generate anonymity scores for any data anonymization technique. The GDA Score, which stands for General Data Anonymity Score, is the first data anonymization measurement methodology that works with any anonymization technique. The GDA Score is a generalization of the measurement technique developed by Francis' group for the Diffix bounty program run last year. This was the first bounty program for anonymity. The GDA Score is of particular interest in Europe, where member states are expected to produce certification programs for anonymity.

The French Data Protection Authority CNIL has recognized the benefits of Diffix anonymization by republishing an article by Paul Francis in which the utility of Diffix anonymization is highlighted. Diffix is the anonymization technology developed in joint research between Francis' group and Aircloak GmbH.

Last year, CNIL published an article titled "Can anonymized data still be useful." The purpose of the article was to demonstrate that strong anonymization does not necessarily prevent useful analytics. In this work, CNIL uses K-anonymity on the New York City taxi database. Inspired by this effort, Francis shows that Diffix can be used for a wide range of analysis on the NYC taxi database, including trip times to LaGuardia airport, taxi driver work profiles, and congestion in the Manhattan financial district.

CNIL re-published the article under the title "Anonymity vs. Utility: Another shot at Anonymizing the New York City taxi dataset".

For the second year in a row, the MPIs for Informatics and Software Systems jointly participated in the annual Girls' Day. We welcomed 14 school-aged girls to our institute, and showed them what computer science research is all about. We spent an exciting morning with hands-on computer science puzzles, soldered cool blinking hearts, and live-edited videos. The winners of our computer science quiz got to take home 3D dragons, printed on our own 3D printers.

Bug bounty programs are a popular way to find security flaws in deployed systems. We are the first to use a bounty program to find flaws in anonymization schemes, namely the anonymization scheme we designed called Diffix. We take an empirical approach to anonymization rather than the more common formal approach. The empirical approach leads to anonymization schemes with high utility, but also uncertainties about the anonymization properties. The bounty program helps build understanding and confidence in Diffix. To learn more, visit challenge.aircloak.com

Outstanding undergraduate and Masters students are invited to learn about world-class research in security and privacy, social systems, distributed systems, machine learning, programming languages, and verification. Leading researchers will engage with attendees in their areas of expertise: the curriculum will include lectures, projects, and interaction with faculty from participating institutions.

Attendees will be exposed to state-of-the-art research in computer science, have the opportunity to interact one-on-one with internationally leading scientists from three of the foremost academic institutions in research and higher learning in the US and in Europe, and network with like-minded students. They will get a sense of what it is like to pursue an academic or industrial research career in computer science and have a head start when applying for graduate school.

Applications are due by February 7, 2018. Travel and accommodation will be covered for accepted students.

More info can be found on the CMMRS website.

The session, entitled “Challenges and Strategies for Certifying Data Anonymization for Data Sharing,” brings together technical and legal experts to explore how Data Protection Officers (DPOs) can manage the complexities and uncertainties of GDPR-compliant data anonymization. The IAPP Congress will be held November 7-9 in Brussels.

Session Abstract:

Data sharing is increasingly important. Companies share data internally across business units to gain business insights, they share data externally with data analytics vendors, and they often share data simply to make money. Ensuring the anonymity of users in the data set is necessary. The process of approving or certifying anonymization however is costly, time consuming, and uncertain. Current approaches to anonymization are ad hoc at best. They require a custom strategy for each new data sharing scenario, and it is often unclear whether the data is really anonymized or not.

In this informative and lively session, corporate DPOs, vendors of analytics solutions, and privacy researchers share their experiences with data anonymization and the approval process. They provide case studies illustrating the pitfalls of "do it yourself" anonymization, and show how some new ready-for-use anonymization can eliminate the delays and guesswork of data anonymization.

Paul Francis will give the keynote address at the Oakland (IEEE S&P) Workshop on Privacy Engineering. The talk, entitled "The Diffix Framework: Revisiting Noise, Again", presents the first database anonymization system that exhibits low noise, unlimited queries, simple configuration, and rich query semantics while still giving strong anonymity.

The workshop will be held May 25 in San Jose, CA.

Talk Abstract:

For over 40 years, the holy grail of database anonymization is a system that allows a wide variety of statistical queries with minimal answer distortion, places no limits on the number of queries, is easy to configure, and gives strong protection of individual user data.  This keynote presents Diffix, a database anonymization system that promises to finally bring us within reach of that goal.  Diffix adds noise to query responses, but "fixes" the noise to the response so that repeated instances of the same response produce the same noise.  While this addresses the problem of averaging attacks, it opens the system to "difference attacks" which can reveal individual user data merely through the fact that two responses differ.  Diffix proactively examines queries and responses to defend against difference attacks.  This talk presents the design of Diffix, gives a demo of a commercial-quality implementation, and discusses shortcomings and next steps.

MPI-INF and MPI-SWS jointly participated in Girl's Day this year.

The Max Planck Institutes for Informatics and Software Systems pursue basic research in many areas of computer science. But what exactly is computer science? And what does a day in the life of a scientist look like in computer science? We addressed these questions by way of hands-on examples and demonstrated, for instance, how a computer learns, how the car navigation system knows how to get from A to B, and also how one doesn’t always need a computer for doing computer science. Along the way, the school girls were able to ask our students and researchers all sorts of questions about what it is like to work in research.

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Die Max-Planck Institute für Informatik und Software Systeme betreiben Grundlagenforschung in vielen Bereichen der Informatik. Aber was genau ist Informatik? Und wie sieht ein Tag im Leben einer Wissenschaftlerin in der Informatik aus? Genau dies haben wir anhand von Beispielen zum Anfassen und Ausprobieren gezeigt und dabei z.B. illustriert, wie ein Computer lernt, wie das Navi weiß wie man von A nach B kommt, und auch dass man für Informatik nicht immer einen Computer braucht. Nebenbei hatten die Schülerinnen die Gelegenheit unseren StudentInnen, DoktorandInnen und WissenschaftlerInnen allerlei Fragen zu stellen, wie es denn ist in der Forschung zu arbeiten.

Outstanding undergraduate and Masters students are invited to learn about world-class research in security and privacy, social systems, distributed systems, machine learning, programming languages, and verification. Leading researchers will engage with attendees in their areas of expertise: the curriculum will include lectures, projects, and interaction with faculty from participating institutions.

Attendees will be exposed to state-of-the-art research in computer science, have the opportunity to interact one-on-one with internationally leading scientists from three of the foremost academic institutions in research and higher learning in the US and in Europe, and network with like-minded students. They will get a sense of what it is like to pursue an academic or industrial research career in computer science and have a head start when applying for graduate school.

Applications are due by February 7, 2017. Travel and accommodation will be covered for accepted students.

More info can be found on the CMMRS website.

A jury chaired by renowned architect Prof. Gunther Henn evaluates fifteen drafts submitted as part of an architecture competition for the design of the institute's new buildings in Kaiserlautern and Saarbruecken. First prize is awarded to a design by the firm of Weinbrenner and Single in Nuertingen. The designs reflect a common architectural concept that fosters communication and cooperation, while each building has a distinct appearance that respects its situation within the campus of the Technical University of Kaiserslautern and Saarland University, respectively. Construction is expected to commence in 2007 and will cost about EUR 20M for both buildings.