Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Max Planck Institute for Informatics at Saarbrücken

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 Kurt Mehlhorn,
• The Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing Department is headed by Bernt Schiele,
• The Department Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics is headed by Thomas Lengauer,
• The Computer Graphics Department is headed by Hans-Peter Seidel
• The Databases and Information Systems Department is headed by Gerhard Weikum
• Research Group Automation of Logic is headed by Christoph Weidenbach
• The Independent Research Group Computational Genomics and Epidemiology is headed by Alice McHardy.

Previously, it included the following departments:

• The Programming Logics Department was headed by Harald Ganzinger (died June 3, 2004)

Members of the institute have received various awards. Kurt Mehlhorn (in 1986) and Hans-Peter Seidel (in 2003) received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Kurt Mehlhorn (in 1995) and Thomas Lengauer (in 2003) received the Konrad-Zuse-Medal, and in 2004 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 Gerhard Weikum.

See also

• Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
• YAGO (database) (developed at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science)

External links

• Max Planck Institute for Informatics Homepage
• International Meeting Place and Research Centre for Computer Science in Dagstuhl Castle
• International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science