Challenges

Every few years we are looking for a new and exciting project where we can demonstrate the abilities of modern theoretical computer science at a challenging "real world" application.

Since 2007: BioNICs

BioNICs is an interdisciplinary project with the goal of developing biologically plausible theoretical models that can explain various aspects of information processing in the cortex. It tries to combine our knowledge from theoretical computer science with the gigantic amount of data and knowledge provided by neuroanatomists and neurophysiologists, in particular by our collaborators at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich.

Besides the development of new models we are also interested in how such models can be simulated efficiently. Here we are searching for appropriate data structures and algorithms that allow us to keep the simulation times in a reasonable range. We developed and implemented a software framework that allows both the simulation of models and the tracing and visualization of the simulations in a very flexible manner. In addition our framework includes concepts for distributing large simulations on clusters.

If you are interested in more information about BioNICs or available student projects feel free to contact either Christoph Krautz or Florian Jug.

2000-2003: E-Jigsaw

In 1989 the "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" of the former German Democratic Republic tried to destroy all documents containing inculpatory material. A majority of the documents was torn by hand only and the pieces later recocered. Those pieces are now stored in archives of the Bundesbehörde für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR: there exist approximately 17.000 bags each containing about 2.000 torn documents. Since 1995 some 25 people are working on reconstructing the pages by hand. When we started our project, only 300  out of the 17000 bags were reconstructed.
In September 2000 we had the idea to develop a prototype of a software system for solving this problem. We pursued this project as a student project (at TU München) and developed a prototype that was presented to the public on 20 May 2003.

For more information see the project web page.