Season's Greetings & Current Newsletter

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 | thws.de, CAIRO

Dear CAIRO friends,

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!



As 2023 draws to a close, we wish to give you a little insight into our journey through the year and share with you a couple of achievements that make us proud and happy:

  1. CAIRO Team is Growing:

    CAIRO team is getting bigger and stronger. In addition to Magda (representation learning) and Pascal (robotics), Ivan has joined in 2023 as a new professor for semantic data processing with focus on natural language, semantics, stylistics and verbal cognition. Together with Frank and Frank who have been here before CAIRO even existed. The team has a solid coverage in the main areas of machine learning and data science. The group of junior researchers has been also evolving. Max, Manu and Philipp have been joined by Alex, David, Lars, Philipp #2 and Steffen. Markus and Toni have moved on and we keep our fingers crossed for the PhD defence of Toni soon to come. We must not forget Ursel who has quickly become indispensable for CAIRO daily operations, Franzi who keeps all of you updated with CAIRO news and of course Pino, who keeps us sane. 

There are many more changes to come in 2024. We hope to fill in four more professor positions in 2024 and the PhDs shall follow suit. We will release the new openings on our career site and we would be thankful for spreading the word to help us get the right talent.

  2. Research in CAIRO
:
    In 2023 our team has published a total of 18 papers on topics covering intelligent robotics, language models, kernel methods, federated learning, deep generative models or indoor positioning. These have been presented at ICRA, ECML, IPIN, ESANN and other conferences and venues and document the research strength of our team. Obviously, these would not be possible without our PhDs: Manu, Markus, Max, Philipp, Steffen and Toni. Good work guys. But as you can see in the full list of publications, there are many more authors who contributed to our publications and we herby thank to all our research collaborators and friends for their amazing work.

  3. CAIRO International:
    
It is no secret that CAIRO is very active in maintaining and growing its international research network. In addition to participating in the above mentioned research collaborations and visiting the well-known conferences and our partner labs abroad (the list would be too long to put here), we have also hosted several international researchers and AI practitioners in CAIRO. If you haven't yet attended any of our regular Thursday morning sessions of the CAIRO Invited Speakers Series be advised that you have just missed the 2023 edition of the event. But do not despair, we have already started the prepwork on the next edition and we shall be back in October 2024. Not sure if this thing is for you? A teaser: Marko Grgurovič, CEO of Triternion shall kick it of on the 10th of October 2024 (ever heard of Mordhau?).
 But we should not forget the young generation. Two junior visiting researchers spent several months in CAIRO in 2023: Ana Muñoz from ITAM, Mexico developed her Master thesis and Lukas Veverka from the University of Economics Prague worked on several contributions to his PhD. Both were warmly welcomed by the CAIRO team and we trust their stay with us has been a worthy international experience. We hope to welcome more visitors in 2024.


  4. CAIRO Connecting Research: 

    Research work can be very rewarding but it can also get very stressful and frustrating. CAIRO knows this and it also knows that being alone does not help. We try to tackle this by providing our researchers the opportunity to exchange ideas and experience, but also share their worries and difficulties. We hold regular PhD research meetings on Thursday afternoons where these discussions take place in a more structured manner. Our good experience from these has led us to to open them up to interested researchers from around THWS (or elsewhere). We have welcomed quite a few colleagues in CAIRO over the year, we have learned a lot from them and we hope they could also learn something from us. But most importantly, we have made the connection and there is nothing that stands in the way for building closer collaborations. If you are interested in connecting more closely, just knock on our doors. Do not worry, we know we are all nerds here (have you seen our glass walls ?) but we do our best to welcome you in CAIRO warmly.

With this, we wish you all lovely Christmas, happy new year, and stay friends with CAIRO also in 2024!
The CAIRO Team

For more news and insights: Have a look at our current newsletter!