Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
max planck institut
informatik
mpii logo Minerva of the Max Planck Society
 

About the Institute

Mission

While the acceleration of hardware has been a landmark of progress in computing technology in the past few decades, the computing enhancements that it provides is dwarfed by the increase in speed, performance, and robustness resulting from new algorithms. As a point in case, the status of hardware and algorithms in 1970 allowed to compute an optimal tour of a traveling salesman (a classical optimization problem and accepted benchmark for computing power) through 120 cities. Increasing the number of cities from n to n+1 leads to a multiplicative increase of the number of possible tours by a factor of n. Thus, relying only on the increase of hardware speed, with today’s technology, and the algorithms of 1970 we could find optimal tours among only 135 cities. It is the progress in algorithms that, today, enables us to find optimal tours between many thousand of cities. Relying only on progress in hardware this performance would not be achievable in hundreds of years. [ more... ]

Structure

Since it opened in December 1990 five research units have been installed to fit the research programme. [ more... ]

Saarland University and Graduate School in Computer Science

MPI-INF is located next the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University (UdS). The campus of UdS is also home to the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction, the Center for Bioinformatics, and the Graduate School of Computer Science. These institutions cooperate closely and comprise a total of more than 300 researchers in computer science.

The members of MPI-INF teach at Saarland University.

Executive Board

Managing Director

Prof. Dr. Bernt Schiele <info@mpi-sb.mpg.de>, Phone: 9325-2000

General Manager

Volker Maria Geiß, Dipl.-Verwalt., <geiss@mpi-klsb.mpg.de>, Phone: 9325-5700

Address

Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Campus E1 4
66123 Saarbrücken
Germany

Telefon: +49 681 / 9325-5700
Telefax: +49 681 / 9325-5719

Email: info@mpi-sb.mpg.de
WWW: http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/

Scientific Advisory Board

Prof. Dr. Pankaj Kumar Agarwal, Duke University, USA

Prof. Dr. Douglas L. Brutlag, Stanford University, School of Medicine, USA

Prof. Dr. Joseph M. Hellerstein, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Prof. Dr. Yannis E. Ioannidis, University of Athens, Greece

Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide, Heinz Nixdorf Institut and Department of Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Germany

Prof. Dr. Eugene Myers, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA

Prof. Dr. Frank Pfenning, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Prof. Dr. Claude Puech, INSITU, France

Prof. Dr. Éva Tardos, Cornell University, USA

Prof. Dr. Demetri Terzopoulos, Department of Computer Science, University of California, USA

Board of Trustees

Hon. Adv. Professor (Tsinghua) Dr. Reinhold Achatz, Corporate Vice President of Corporate Technology Siemens AG

Dr. Siegfried Dais, Stellvertretender Vorsitzender der Geschäftsführung der Robert Bosch GmbH

Christiane Götz-Sobel, Leiterin der Redaktion Naturwissenschaft und Technik, ZDF

Dr. Christoph Hartmann, Minister für Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft, Saarland

Prof. Dr. Joachim Hertel, DACOS Software GmbH

Prof. Dr. Stefan Jähnichen, Präsident der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.

Prof. Dr. Henning Kagermann, Präsident acatech

Prof. Dr. Volker Linneweber, Universität des Saarlandes

Prof. Dr. Wolf-Dieter Lukas, Ministerialdirektor, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung

Dr. Nelson Mattos, Vice President, Engineering, EMEA, Google

Prof. Dr. Wolffried Stucky, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Universität Karlsruhe

Prof. Dr. Margret Wintermantel, Präsidentin der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz