News

News from the Institute of Computer Science at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Cutting-edge research at the Institute of Computer Science: Prof Sebastian Erdweg receives ERC Consolidator Grant

The energy consumption of data centers and ICT devices grows at an alarming rate and will be responsible for up to 20% of the global energy consumption by 2030. To sustain the ongoing digital transformation, we must find ways to run software dramatically more efficiently. A promising direction is incremental computing. Incremental computations react to input changes rather than recomputing their result from scratch, which is known to deliver asymptotic speedups in theory and order-of-magnitude speedups in practice. However, current approaches to incrementality have limited applicability: They either require expert knowledge, or only support specialized domains (e.g., database queries), or only yield modest speedups. The goal of this project is to develop a methodology for automatically incrementalizing computations and significantly improving their time and energy efficiency.

The AUTOINC project achieves this ambitious goal by establishing a novel foundation for incremental computing in three complementary parts. First, the project develops a library of incremental operators for atomic and other essential data types as part of a novel framework of differential theories, which ensure the correctness and composability of the operators. Second, the project designs a low-level intermediate representation (IR) for describing compositional incremental computations as computation networks and provides a novel differential recomputing semantics for the IR. Third, the project develops an optimizing compiler that translates existing code to the low-level incremental IR and uses operators from differential theories where possible. Each part is useful in its own right, but together AUTOINC enables developers to automatically incrementalize the reactive parts of existing programs. Besides improving the efficiency of programs, this project will produce fundamental insights about the nature and limits of automatic incremental computing.

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Katharina von der Wense commences her professorship

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Katharina von der Wense

 

We warmly welcome Prof. KATHARINA VON DER WENSE to our Institute. She commenced her endowed professorship at Johannes Gutenberg University on July 1, 2023 and heads the new JGU working group for language processing. Her research focuses in particular on models for languages with limited resources, computational morphology and language processing for the fields of education and medicine. Prof. von der Wense is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA and has been involved in over 50 publications, some of which have won awards, most recently the IJCNLP-AACL 2023 Social Impact Award.

Further information can be found on her research group page.

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Sarah Neuwirth commences her professorship

Prof. Dr. Sarah Neuwirth

 

We warmly welcome Prof. SARAH NEUWIRTH, who has held the professorship for National High Performance Computing and its Applications at Johannes Gutenberg University since October 1, 2023. Prof. Neuwirth represents JGU as a member of the transnational NHR South-West consortium, which includes JGU Mainz, Kaiserlautern University of Technology, Goethe University Frankfurt, and Saarland University. In addition to the further development of high-performance computing, she will be responsible for the provision of computing capacities at the Center for Data Processing and support teaching in the field of high-performance computing at the Institute of Computer Science.
Prof. Neuwirth's research interests include parallel storage systems, modular supercomputing, performance engineering and communication protocols. She has cooperated with renowned research institutes such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Jülich Supercomputing Center. She received the 2023 PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC for her achievements.

Further information can be found on the website of her research group.

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Thesis Offer: MSc thesis on graph databases for systems neuroscience

A topic for a master thesis is now offered under the new collaboration of the Institute of Computer Science with the Institute of Pathophysiology, University Medical Center. The thesis will investigate the modelling and the development of a graph database for systems neuroscience.
For more information, please read the description in https://seafile.rlp.net/f/0a8cdb58b91d4830901a/.

Those interested should contact Professor Bouros of the Data Management Group.

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Information on the start of studies in the summer term 2021

Welcome to the Institute of Computer Science at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. At the beginning of your studies, you usually have many questions and do not know exactly what student life will look like in the upcoming months. For a successful start you will find some of the most important information on this page:

General information:

In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching will continue to take a different form than usual in the sumer term  2021. In particular, most of the courses will not be held as face-to-face lectures at the university, but will take place completely or partially in digital form.

>> Information page about the start of the department 08 <<<

Contact

If you have any questions about the structure or content of your study please use the following contact form:

Kontaktformular Studienbüro/-fachberatung

Introductory Course

The introductory course for first-year students cannot take place in the usual form this time either, but will be replaced by digital formats. First of all, you will find a series of short videos (in German) under the following link, which deal with typical questions about the structure of the program and the first semester.

In addition, there will be an online introductory event on 6 April 2021, 10:15 am  to 11:45 am, where you can get in touch with some of the lecturers.

Each Tuesday from 16 March to 30 March there will be an online-meeting Plauderecke Informatik starting at 5 pm. If you would like to get in touch with other first-year students or meet some of the lecturers of the first-term courses, you are welcome to join in the BigBlueButton room.

Important dates in the summer term

You will start your studies in the summer term 2021. Each semester consists mainly of the lecture period, during which you will attend lectures and accompanying exercises as well as seminars. The lecture period is followed by a three-week examination period during which the examinations or oral exams take place. But there is also a lot to do in the period after the examination period until the beginning of the following semester. During this time, for example, practical courses and seminar preparations take place.

  • Start of the lecture period: 12 April 2021
  • End of the lecture period: 17 July  2021
  • Examination period: 19 July to 31 July 2021

VIDEO LIVE CHAT on Master Programmes on 20 January

You are looking for study options following your bachelor degree? Then you are welcome to join our Video Chat (MS Teams). We are going to present the master study programmes which are offered by the Institute of Computer Science as well as other programmes, e.g. the Master Programme Human Factors offered by the Institute of Psychology and a Dual Programme IT-Management of the University of Applied Science Mainz which is eligible for JGU graduates as well.

The Video Chat takes place on Wednesday 20 January 2021 at 5 p.m., please follow this link:

Video Chat Master Programmes

 

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