Doctoral Research Program
The International Max Planck Research School on Trustworthy Computing (IMPRS-TRUST) is a graduate program jointly run by the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Computer Science Department at Saarland University, and the Computer Science Department at TU Kaiserslautern.
Spotlight
Protein structure and interactions: Bioinformaticssupported fight against viral diseases
Olga Kalinina combines genomic-, modeling-, and biophysics-based methods to assess the mutations observed in given sequences of viral proteins and infer their potential influence on the function of the protein. This enables suggestions for drug treatment of viral diseases.
Directors & Senior Researchers
Martin Bromberger
Dengxin Dai
Anja Feldmann, Director
Tobias Fiebig
Oliver Gasser
Andreas Karrenbauer
Thomas Lengauer, Director (em.)
Kurt Mehlhorn, Director (em.)
Karol Myszkowski
Danupon Nanongkai, Director
Rishiraj Saha Roy
Bernt Schiele, Director
Hans-Peter Seidel, Director
Christian Theobalt, Director
Christoph Weidenbach
Gerhard Weikum, Director
Yiting Xia
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.
The Max Planck Institute for Informatics is devoted to cutting-edge research in informatics with a focus on algorithms and their applications in a broad sense.