New faces
Timon Klein and Reinhold Wittmann joined our group as PhD students during the year 2023. After finishing his Master's thesis Machine Learning Classification of Brain States Based on MEG Recordings, Timon started in April to work as a PhD student in our working group and continues to develop and analyze deep learning models. He will work on the KlimaNot project, a joint research effort with clinical emergency units in Magdeburg, Aachen, and Stuttgart to predict demand from environmental data. After finishing his Master's thesis Optimierung von P2Chem Prozessen mit dem BlockSQP Algorithmus, Reinhold continues with a similar topic in his PhD project. He started in September. Welcome to the group!
Completion of theses
Tobias Weber defended his thesis Source detection in graphs. His thesis is strongly based on this paper published also in 2023 and awarded with the Howard Rosenbrock best paper prize 2023. Tobias defined a new problem class that targets the efficient location of sources of spreading processes on graphs under uncertainty. Additional reviewer of his thesis was Andreas Potschka.
Two Bachelor theses were successfully defended: Julien Brandes (Gurobi Optimization / Gurobi -- Machine Learning) and Jonathan Scholz (Optimales Predictive Maintenance für gruppierte Entitäten).
Also several Master theses were successfully defended: Timon Klein (Machine Learning Classification of Brain States Based on MEG Recordings), Martha Vollmar (Untersuchung der Lebensdauer von Einbauteilen in einem Rohrreaktor durch Maschinelles Lernen), and Reinhold Wittmann (Optimierung von P2Chem Prozessen mit dem BlockSQP Algorithmus).
Excellence initiative
We submitted a draft proposal to the DFG for a possible cluster of excellence in Magdeburg: the SmartProSys initiative. The evaluation of the draft proposal was done online via zoom and was successful. To stimulate collaboration and research exchange we organised a symposium in Magdeburg.
Conferences and social events
The Max Planck Institute in Magdeburg celebrated its 25th birthday.
In the same year on November 1, Sebastian started a Max Planck fellow group Optimization and Machine Learning at the MPI.
Our christmas party, following Tobias' defense, again in Il Capitello.
