Issue 3 | 2022

In recent years, hardly any buzzword has become as much a part of everyday human life as “artificial intelligence” – from voice assistants and autonomous driving to “deep fakes” in video clips. Science, meanwhile, has long been dealing with the methods behind the buzzword. Computer scientist Jan Stühmer is working on novel algorithms and models for this. Since 1 September, he has headed the new HITS junior group “Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence” (MLI). Jan Stühmer was concurrently appointed as a junior professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

A team of astrophysicists including HITS group leader Fabian Schneider has found the proverbial – invisible – needle in the stellar haystack: an inactive stellar-mass black hole located in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Their findings were published in the journal “Nature Astronomy.”

The section “Beyond the limits” is dedicated to the Open Day in July: For the first time in four years, HITS invited the public again and, in addition to lectures, hands-on stations and presentations, offered tours of the historic garden on campus for the first time.