max planck institut
informatik
informatik
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... ]
Since it opened in December 1990 five research units have been installed to fit the research programme. [ more... ]
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.
Prof. Dr. Kurt Mehlhorn <info@mpi-sb.mpg.de>, Phone: 9325-400
Volker Geiß, Dipl.-Verwalt., <geiss@mpi-sb.mpg.de>, Phone: 9325-700
Telefon: +49 681 / 9325-915
Telefax: +49 681 / 9325-799
Email: info@mpi-sb.mpg.de
WWW: http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/
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, INRIA, France
Prof. Dr. Éva Tardos, Cornell University, USA
Prof. Dr. Demetri Terzopoulos, Department of Computer Science, University of California, USA
Joachim Rippel, Minister für Wirtschaft, Saarland
Peter Stefan Herbst, Chefredakteur Saarbrücker Zeitung
Prof. Dr. Joachim Hertel, Infor Business Solutions AG
Prof. Dr. Matthias Jarke, RWTH Aachen
Prof. Dr. Volker Linneweber, Universität des Saarlandes
Ministerialdirektor Dr. Wolf-Dieter Lukas, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
Fritz Raff, Intendant des Saarländischen Rundfunks
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Raffler, Siemens AG
Prof. Dr. Wolffried Stucky, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Universität Karlsruhe
Dr. Richard Weber, Präsident IHK des Saarlandes
Prof. Dr. Margret Wintermantel, Präsidentin der Hochschulrektorenkonferenz