Academic growth: UTN doubles professorships and expands research profile

The Founding Executive Board has welcomed a total of eight new professors to the university in recent weeks. Their fields of expertise include various facets of artificial intelligence, psychology and mathematics. The professorships are divided between the two departments of Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Prof. Dr. Yuki Asano moved from the University of Amsterdam to the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN) and, at the age of 31, is one of the youngest AI professors in Germany. He will establish the Fundamental AI Lab in the Department of Engineering, which aims to develop pioneering technologies for the next generation of foundation models. These fundamental computer models serve as the basis for numerous AI applications.

The focus of the Computer Vision and Machine Perception Labs at UTN is on the development of machine perception algorithms that are not rigid, but can adapt to their environment and evolve. Prof. Dr. Eddy Ilg was appointed to this department and has previously published articles on computer vision in the field of optical flow and further developed AR technologies for Meta.

Machine understanding of language

Machine understanding of human language is the focus of two labs: in the Natural Language Understanding Lab, Prof. Dr. Michael Roth is researching the interplay of linguistic meaning and background knowledge as well as the inherent challenges of language, such as implicitness and ambiguity. His research also focuses on diversity and inclusion in language.

The Natural Language Learning and Generation Lab, in which Prof. Dr. Steffen Eger holds a professorship, researches a broad spectrum of natural language processing. With the help of machine learning and AI methods, the aim is to solve challenges in text generation, for example in the generation of poems in humanities contexts.

Psychology expands the research profile of the UTN

The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences is being expanded to include a new subject area: psychology. Prof. Dr. Magdalena Abel is moving from the University of Regensburg to the UTN and is researching human learning and memory in the Cognitive Psychology Lab. This area will be complemented by the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab with Prof. Dr. Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann, who will start her work at the beginning of next year.

In addition, the field of mathematics in the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences will be further strengthened. In the Discrete Optimization Lab, Prof. Dr. Johannes Thürauf is working on the question of how uncertainties can be taken into account in optimization processes. Prof. Dr. Christoph Hertrich will start at the beginning of 2025 and set up the Applied Discrete Mathematics Lab.

Overall, the new appointments have doubled the number of professorships at the UTN to 16. This will further promote interdisciplinary research at the university and lay the foundation for the new Master’s degree course in Human and Artificial Intelligence, which will start next winter semester.

Prof. Dr. Yuki Asano
Prof. Dr. Eddy Ilg
Prof. Dr. Michael Roth
Prof. Dr. Steffen Eger
Prof. Dr. Magdalena Abel
Prof. Dr. Johannes Thürauf
Prof. Dr. Christoph Hertrich