Newsletter of the Department of Computer Science (Winter Semester 2022/23)
Dear Readers,
once or twice a semester we want to inform you about important and interesting news from the Department and the RPTU.
If you have any wishes, suggestions or news for the next issue, please contact us via inf-pr-submit@cs.uni-kl.de
Enjoy reading
the publicity committee of the Department of Computer Science
New and familiar faces
Upcoming Appointments
Upcoming Appointments
An appointment procedure is underway:
- Prof. Stephanie Roos will join the department in the field of distributed and networked systems in the summer term and will already offer some new lectures in that field.
New appointment - Prof. Annette Bieniusa
Prof. Annette Bieniusa introduces herself
I come from Kaiserslautern and graduated from St. Franziskus High School. My studies then took me to Saarbrücken, Leeds and Freiburg, where I also completed my PhD. after a PostDoc in Paris at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), I came back to the Palatinate - this is the nicest place! Since 2012, I have been teaching and researching at the Department of Computer Science, first as an academic (Ober)Rätin, and since this winter semester as a professor.
My research focuses on programming languages and models for distributed and concurrent systems that enable consistent low-latency data access and asynchronous communication. These techniques are used in geo-replicated systems (large scale distributed systems, cloud/edge computing, IoT) as well as in modern multi/manycore computing architectures. I find semantic analysis and verification as well as the development of programming languages (extensions) and corresponding tools, which have meanwhile also been adapted by industry, particularly exciting. In addition, we also have research projects on the didactics of computer science. There, we investigate, for example, which computer science competencies can be taught in science classes.
In teaching, I have already been able to implement some new concepts with my team at the department over the last 10 years: We have developed Exclaim as a submission and testing system for programming exercises, conducted training courses for programming competitions, and also successfully introduced new examination formats such as portfolio examinations. Currently, we are working with the computer center to develop a concept for e-exams so that students no longer have to program on paper in the exams.
New appointment - Prof. Leo van Waveren
Prof. Leo van Waveren introduces himself
During or following my doctorate on the topic "Occupational competencies in international comparison. An Empirical Study of Electronics Technicians for Automation Technology and Automotive Mechatronics Technicians in Germany and Switzerland" in 2017 with Prof. Nickolaus in Stuttgart, I already had a research stay at the TU Kaiserslautern at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering between 2016 and 2018. At the end of November 2018, I returned once again to Stuttgart as a post-doc at the Institute of Educational Sciences. Parallel to working on various EU projects, I took over the management of the Professional School of Education as a parental leave replacement between September 2020 and August 2021. Since August of this year, I have been leading the working group "Subject didactics in technology" at our department.
Prof. van Waveren's research focuses on outcomes of teaching-learning processes, international comparative studies in the education system, and digitization (in teacher education).
What (new) ideas do you have for teaching here at RPTU in Kaiserslautern? As one of the few locations in Germany, the RPTU in Kaiserslautern has announced the subject didactics for the teaching profession at vocational schools as an area didactics. The working group is thus oriented as a contact for the LA students of the subjects construction, electrical engineering, wood technology, metal technology and information technology/computer science. This breadth of influential perspectives gives rise to a whole range of exciting opportunities to consider courses with an interprofessional slant. In my view, the continuation of evidence-based teacher training is not only a central pillar, but also an opportunity to allow research results to find their way into teaching practice at an early stage.
Particularly due to the already existing school network, it seems very attractive if the interlocking of school practice and university education of teachers is in mutual exchange and a coherence of the phases (LA-study, Ref, further education) is actively co-designed by the participating institutions. Currently, there is a shortage of teachers in the technical subjects (not only in RLP), so that the recruitment of new students will also be of considerable importance here if a comprehensive supply of teaching is to be guaranteed in the long term.
Together with colleagues who are already working intensively in the project LehrLernLabore@U.EDU on the implementation and concepts of new teaching-learning formats, the working group will in future also deal with technology-supported approaches that go beyond current school practice in a sub-project affiliated with this project. In this way, limits and possibilities are to be explored early on in order to prepare the training of teachers for future developments.
What do you expect from Kaiserslautern and the RPTU in Kaiserslautern, the faculty? Expectation sounds so one-sided. The rate of increase of available knowledge, makes it impossible that we can equip teachers with the complete knowledge that is needed for later professional life. Thus, teachers must be prepared for a future that we ourselves do not (cannot) know. Accordingly, one of our tasks is to teach how to use tools to adapt to a changing environment and to changes in society and technology. In its mission statement, RPTU in Kaiserslautern formulates a clear commitment to evidence orientation in teacher education, which in my view is a key requirement here. Not only in the BBS sector - but also there - contact with the state of research in the subject sciences is of elementary importance. Compared to a number of traditional disciplines, computer science is a rather young domain. At the same time, the penetration of society is so all-encompassing that the responsibility arises here not necessarily to deliver, but to support the search for answers. The field is much further along in the state of research than is reflected in the curricula of (vocational) schools. The question will therefore arise again and again, which contents will have to find their way into the schools in terms of their (future) significance - the answers will only be given together and will have to be followed up again and again.
At the same time, we are training the managers of the coming generations in the specialist courses of study. Taking on a leadership role will increasingly also mean initiating activity-related teaching-learning processes in institutions/departments, since here, too, the change already mentioned must be actively planned into one's own actions. It therefore seems to me entirely desirable that we foreseeably also initiate the basics of didactic teaching in the non-teaching degree courses. I do not expect that there will be a silver bullet, but that a mix of elective courses and cooperatively designed continuing education concepts can be steps towards such a development.
Farewells
Unfortunately, some colleagues are also leaving us this year:
- Prof. Sören Laue, who has been teaching at our department since 01.06.2022, has received and accepted a call to the University of Hamburg.
Decedents
We mournfully bid farewell to a longtime colleague who passed away last year:
- Herr Prof. Dieter Maaß (passed away 16. December 2022)
Our sympathy goes out to the relatives.
Campus life
Pupils visiting our faculty
Girls day 2022
The last Girls Day took place on September 30, 2022. The Department of Computer Science and its related research institutes participated in the Girls Day with a total of five different contributions, such as the use of AI in planning the graduation party, the cultivation of plants with a FarmBot or a DIY Retrogame.
Visit of the Lise Meitner Gynnasium
At the end of November, the advanced computer science courses of the Lise Meitner Gynnasium in Maxdorf spent a whole day at our department. Through the contact with our student advisor Christian Bogner, the students were given the opportunity to get to know the robot EMAH and the planting robot (FarmBot) in Digital Farming as well as to attend the lecture "Fundamentals of Programming" of Prof. Hinze. Details about the visit can be found on the website of the Lise-Meitner-Gymnasium ...
E-Woche in Winter Semester 2022/23
Last October, the introductory weeks of the computer science department (called E-Woche) were again on the agenda. Almost 80 freshmen started their new studies on computer science, social computing, or teaching and were invited to participate in the events. The three-week program of the student council is intended to help the freshmen to start their studies. After the math pre-course, there was the opportunity in the afternoon to find out about the studies, to get to know the university and its services and to listen to experiences of older students. The evening events guaranteed fun and were used as a chance to get to know the new fellow students better and to find friends and drop-off groups. The E-Woche was concluded by the computer science pre-course, which took place the entire third week. Here, the students had the opportunity to program small robots in groups and then compete with each other in a battle. The three best teams received a small prize which was provided by the "Förderverein Informatik" (FIT). The student council would like to thank all helping hands and is looking forward to the next E-Woche (freshmen week)!
Student Statistics
In addition to the report of our student council about the "Ersti-Woche" in October, you will find here a short overview of our application and enrollment figures for the current winter semester.
A total of 1,216 applicants were interested in all of our degree programs (including distance learning), 385 applicants were granted admission; 227 applicants enrolled.
After the departments of Social and Economic Sciences and Mechanical Engineering, our department ranks third with these enrollment figures.
Details can be found in the student statistics of Department 4.
Christmas party of the student council
After a short hiatus, the Christmas party of the computer science department took place again shortly before the end of the year.
Many students of computer science, professors and staff members attended and celebrated in a festive atmosphere with candlelight and a Christmas tree.
In addition to food, mulled wine and cookies, the teaching prizes were awarded for the first time since the Corona Pandemic:
There were a total of 24 prizes awarded over the period of the last 6 semesters. Congratulations to the winners and thank you for the great commitment in teaching.
Special thanks to the helping hands of the Christmas party, who made sure that the party could take place at all!
Further thanks to the faculty for the past and future years of great cooperation.
Topics and reports
Award "Test of Time"
Computer Science Research in Kaiserslautern Passes the "Test of Time"
a time-varying flow.
The calculation of the structures
is made possible by the approach
presented approach,
which has become one of the
standard methods in this field.
The Department of Computer Science at RPTU is one of the leading computer science departments in Germany. Researchers at the department received two high-ranking international awards in 2022.
Together with his co-authors, Marius Kloft, who leads the Machine Learning group at RPTU, received the Test of Time Award from the Anomaly and Novelty Detection, Explanation and Accommodation 2022 (ANDEA) workshop at the prestigious ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2022 (KDD) meeting. His 2018 work is thus recognized as the most important contribution in the field of anomaly detection in the last 10 years. Nowadays, anomaly detection using machine learning methods is increasingly finding its way into a wide range of practice-relevant application fields. In total, only two papers were awarded in this category.
For their 2007 publication in the field of flow visualization, Christoph Garth, professor and head of the Scientific Visualization group, and Hans Hagen, senior professor and head of the Computer Graphics & HCI group, together with their co-authors, received the Test of Time Award at the IEEE Conference on Visualization and Visual Analytics, the highest-ranking and most prestigious conference in the field of visualization. The research work, conducted in Kaiserslautern at the time, presented a novel method to effectively compute and visualize important structures in time-varying flows with previously unattainable quality. The described methods have meanwhile become standard methods and are part of many software tools for scientific visualization. The corresponding publication was cited most frequently among all contributions from 2007 in the field of scientific visualization.
These two awards also continue to strongly document the top quality of computer science research at RPTU.
ERC Consolidator Grant Award
Great success for Prof. Anthony Lin
Prof. Lin was awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant in January. The European Research Council (ERC) award is one of the most prestigious research grants worldwide and is funded with around two million euros for a period of five years.
The department congratulates Prof. Lin on this great achievement!
We will report in detail on this award shortly.
ODPfalz-II
ODPfalz-II to be continued for another five years
As part of the federal-state initiative "Innovative University", the project "ODPfalz-II - Open Digitalization Alliance Palatinate II - Where Innovative Universities Shape a Sustainable Digital Future" started on 01.01.2023 and will run for five years until 31.12.2027. ODPfalz is a joint project of Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences, the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM) and the Leibniz Institute for Composite Materials, with additional, strategic partners (without funding). Press release of the Hochschule Kaiserslautern Press release of the Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonfereny (GWK) Bonn
Participating professors from our department are Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns, Prof. Dr. Jörg Dörr and Apl.-Prof. Dr. Achim Ebert. The mentioned professors work in the subprojects Innovation Area "Sustainability & Resource Efficiency" (Prof. Berns and Prof. Dörr) and Innovation Area "Work" (Apl.-Prof. Ebert).
The mentioned professors work in the subprojects Innovation Area "Sustainability & Resource Efficiency" (Prof. Berns and Prof. Dörr) and Innovation Area "Work" (Apl.-Prof. Ebert).
The sub-project IB Sustainability & Resource Efficiency supports regional actors in their efforts to achieve sustainable and resource-conserving economic activity and sustainable innovations through the use of digitalization and automation.
The sub-project IB Work is being newly initiated in order to accompany and shape the changes and effects on the workforce and work processes in companies associated with digitization.
PhD meeting Dagstuhl
First PhD Colloquium at Dagstuhl Castle
During November 24-25, 2022, the first part of the PhD colloquium in the winter semester 2022/23 took place, in which the PhD students of the Department of Computer Science present their topics and first results after the first year of their PhD work. Thanks to the generous financial support of FIT e.V., the presenters, together with Prof. Annette Bieniusa and Prof. Marius Kloft, were able to spend two days at the Leibniz Center for Informatics Schloß Dagstuhl. The presentations ranged from theoretical foundations and applications of ML in agriculture, blast furnaces, smart power grids and augmented vision to verification of hybrid cyber-physical systems and optimized data compression. In addition, the group explored the forest around Dagstuhl and the wine cellar in the evening. Presentations by Prof. Kloft on scientific writing and a report by Billy Joe Franks on doctoral representation and other committees at RPTU completed the event. The meeting had two intensive days with discussions, encounters and a lot of fun - we are looking forward to the next event and are grateful for the financial support of the "Förderverein Informatik" (FIT)!
The second part of the colloquium took place in February at RPTU in Kaiserlautern. The abstracts of the presentations and further information about the PhD program of the department can be found at https://phd.cs.uni-kl.de/events/talks/.
Elections of the Faculty Council and the Senate
Senate
For the Department of Computer Science, the professors are represented in the Senate by Prof. Garth (Prof. Michel as substitute member) and the students by Aaron Hackenberg (Lasse Cezanne as substitute member).
Faculty Council of the Department:
The FBR will be composed of the following members:
| Professors | Students | Akademic staff | Technical and administrative staff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bieniusa, Annette | Stuppy, Lea | Thees, Joachim | Frey, Caroline |
| Garth, Christoph | Stieß, Julian | Bogner, Christian | |
| Schmitt, Jens | Lütke-Bordewick, Anika | Hansert, Patrick | |
| Deßloch, Stefan | Slany, Lina | ||
| Leitte, Heike | |||
| Michel, Sebastian | |||
| Schneider, Klaus | |||
| Zweig, Katharina | |||
| Dörr, Jörg | |||
Merger of the Universities in Kaiserslautern and Landau
Email domain rules in new rptu.de domain
With the establishment of the RPTU, the new domain rptu.de was introduced.
For the Department of Computer Science, the subdomain cs.rptu.de was introduced.
Gradually, all services and email addresses offered to the outside world will be switched to this domain.
The hostnames and email addresses in the old domain cs.uni-kl.de will remain available and usable in the long run. It is recommended to keep especially the externally distributed server addresses (e.g. web servers) and email addresses accessible in parallel (by redirections or server/email aliases).
The following email addresses were automatically created by the RHRK for the RHRK accounts:
- accountname@rptu.de
On the account administration page of the RHRK, each user can select a "speaking alias" from a predefined list.
These always contain a period to distinguish them, e.g. "firstname.lastname" (recommended selection).
Based on this alias, new alias email addresses are created for the same mail account:
- alias@rptu.de
- alias@cs.rptu.de (for employees of the CS department)
- alias@edu.rptu.de (for all students at RPTU)
The email addresses in the department domain cs.rptu.de will be made available shortly. (As of mid-February 2023: "in a few weeks".)
As soon as these are ready, the address alias@cs.rptu.de is to be used as uniformly as possible in the Department of Computer Science, especially for external presentation,
in order to achieve a clear external representation of the department.
Use of the new name RPTU in the international context
Since 01.01.2023, the former TUK and the university in Landau merged to the new RPTU. The English designation of the RPTU is as follows:
For publications in English and scientific events, the following designations can be used:
- RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau oder
- University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
The correct postal adress is:
Gottlieb-Daimler-Straße 47
67663 Kaiserslautern
Postfach 3049
67653 Kaiserslautern
Gottlieb-Daimler-Straße 47
67663 Kaiserslautern
Announcements
Informatik-Sommerfest 2023
SAVE-THE-DATE!
Dear members of the computer science department, please already save the date for this year's Informatik-Sommerfest which will take place on
Friday, June 30, 2023
It is planned that in the morning some companies will present themselves in the foyer of building 42 (in front of the Audimax) - similar to a company fair. (Praxis-Tag Informatik)
Later in the afternoon, the department will follow its graduation ceremony with honors for graduates in the Audimax.
After the "official" part, the department invites everyone to a Informatik-Sommerfest with live music outside.
Support is needed preparing this event and on the event itself. If you are interested and have time to support our organization team, please contact us at the following e-mail:
Thank you in advance for your help!
Attention (creative) students wanted for video shooting!
Dear students of the Department of Computer Science
the publicity committee is looking for creative people who are motivated and willing to shoot a short video about studying at the Department of Computer Science in cooperation with the student council and representatives of the department. The video should inspire potential students to study computer science at RPTU and give an insight into your everyday life as a student. If you would like to be involved in this project for a longer period of time, please contact us directly at
In this context, it would also be conceivable to found a working group if there are several interested parties. The publicity committee is looking forward to your message!
Did you know?
Newspapers and Journals
A variety of newspapers and magazines can be read on campus in print or as an online version:
Here is the link to the newspapers available at the UB (printed and some with online licenses): Universitätsbibliothek RPTU
For magazines and journals, the Electronic Journals Library (EZB) can be accessed on campus and for computer science journals, the following link can be searched:
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek RPTU
The "traffic light system" informs whether and how the full texts of the journals are available.
For computer scientists, the following two journals may be of particular interest: