Machine Learning Computer Science Research at Max Planck Institutes

Mario Fritz heads the Scalable Learning and Perception group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Advances in sensor technology and availability of data resources on the Web now give machines a more detailed "picture" of the real world than ever before--but machines are not yet able to acquire the rich semantic understanding that comes easily to humans. To narrow this gap, two of the group's main research themes are scalable learning, to facilitate the acquisition of large-scale knowledge representations, and scalable inference, to enable reasoning over large output spaces at test time. Progress in this direction will facilitate seamless interaction and information exchange between machines and humans, with applications in information retrieval, robotics, human-machine collaboration, and assisted living.