high performance computing

We are pleased to announce RL4AA'25, the third instalment of the workshop series organised by the Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Accelerators (RL4AA) Collaboration. After two very successful workshops in 2023 and 2024 in Karlsruhe and Salzburg, we are excited to announce the next workshop for 2025. RL4AA'25 will be hosted by DESY in the beautiful port city of Hamburg, Germany.

The workshop will bring together experts from the fields of machine learning, accelerator physics, and high-performance computing to discuss the latest developments in the field of reinforcement learning for autonomous accelerators. The workshop will feature invited talks, contributed talks, and poster sessions, as well as a panel discussion on the future of autonomous accelerators.

RL4AA welcomes seasoned RL practitioners as well as newcomers. We are doing our best to make sure there is something for everyone, from introductory tutorials to advanced research talks.

Note also that this year’s workshop is organised in coordination with 5th ICFA Beam Dynamics Mini-Workshop on Machine Learning for Particle Accelerators (MaLAPA) workshop at CERN. Both workshops are organised such that you can attend them one after the other.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to Hamburg in 2025!

Welcome to the 2025 edition of the WarmWorld-ESiWACE3 Summer School, in the old town of Lauenburg near Hamburg!

The Summer School will give an insight into ICON , one of the state-of-the-art weather and climate science models. The students will learn basic meteorology concepts and will be invited to tackle code challenges using intermediate and advanced approaches from software engineering, high-performance computing and data analysis, all under the guidance of experienced lecturers from these various fields.

Important dates

• Apr 15, 2025 – Deadline for travel grants requests
• Apr 30, 2025 – Registration closes
• until May 15, 2025 – Notification of acceptance
• Jul 28 - Aug 7, 2025 – Summer School

Institutions

• IT Center for Science (CSC-IT)
• Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ)
• Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD)
• Technical University of Munich (TUM)
• University of Cologne , Center for Earth System Observation and Computational Analysis (CESOC)
• Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) 

Prof. Dr. Özgür Özçep, Universität Hamburg, CHAI

Abstract:
Analogies and analogical reasoning are central topics at the intersection of various disciplines such as computer science (in particular AI), legal reasoning, cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics. This talk focuses on the model of analogical proportions understood as quaternary relations of the form a:b::c:d, read as “a is to b as c is to d.” After presenting recent general results on analogical proportions, the talk discusses their application to concrete instances in two subareas of AI: (1) mechanism design for fair resource allocation and (2) geometry-based knowledge graph embeddings. 

Institution

• UHH

Prof. Dr. Alan Dennis from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, USA, will give a talk titled “Celebrity as a Service. An experiment examining the effects of using a highly human realistic AI agent that looks and sounds like a celebrity versus an unknown human for Public Service Announcements”.

Prof. Dr. Alan Dennis is a Distinguished Professor of Information Systems and holds the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. He was named a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2012 and received the LEO award in 2021. His research focuses on three main themes: artificial intelligence, team collaboration, and fake news on social media. Professor Dennis has written more than 150 research papers, and has won numerous awards for his theoretical and applied research. He is ranked the second most published Information Systems researcher since we began keeping records in 1990, and a 2021 analysis of citation data placed him in the top 1% of the most influential researchers in the world, across all scientific disciplines. His research has been reported in the popular press almost 1000 times, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CBS, Fox Business Network, as well as Canada’s CBC and CTV, and UK’s Daily Mail and the Telegraph. He is a past President of the Association for Information Systems, and also served as Vice President for Conferences.

Institution

• UHH

Abstract
The focus of my research has been to investigate how cognitive agents can develop structural representation and functions via iterative interaction with the world, exercising agency and learning from resultant perceptual experience. For this purpose, my team has developed various models analogous to predictive coding and active inference frameworks based on the free energy principle. Those models have been used for conducting diverse robotics experiments which include goal-directed planning and replanning in a dynamic environment, social embodied interactions, development of the higher cognitive competency for meta-cognition. The current talk highlights a set of emergent phenomena which we observed in our recent robotics study focused on embodied language [1]. These findings could inform us how children can develop compositional linguistic competency only through limited amount of sensory-motor-language associative learning.

Bio
Jun Tani received the D.Eng. degree from Sophia University, Tokyo in 1995. He started his research career with Sony Computer Science Lab. in 1993. He became a PI in RIKEN Brain Science Institute in 2001. He became a tenured Professor at KAIST, South Korea in 2012. He is currently a full Professor at OIST. He is also a visiting professor of The Technical University of Munich. His current research interests include cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, phenomenology, complex adaptive systems, and robotics. He is an author of “Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena." published from Oxford Univ. Press in 2016.

Institution

• UHH

Prof. Dr. Julia Zeller-Lanzl, Universität Hamburg, DIT

Digital technologies are transforming the world of work at an unprecedented pace. They enable new forms of collaboration, create flexibility, and open up new possibilities for knowledge work and innovation. At the same time, many employees experience digital work as increasingly accelerated, boundaryless, and demanding.

These tensions have become particularly visible in recent years through two profound developments: the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shift toward hybrid work, as well as the rapid spread of (generative) AI. Both developments have rapidly changed where we work and how we work, communicate, and make decisions.

In my inaugural lecture, I explore how digital work can be designed in ways that allow people to benefit from it in the long term. It focuses on three perspectives: How can digital technologies meaningfully support people? How can digital work be designed in healthy and sustainable ways? And how can we prevent people from being excluded or left behind by digital transformation?

Drawing on current research and future research directions, I discuss why the future of digital work depends not only on technological innovation, but above all on how we design digital work in organizations and for people.

Institution

• UHH

Prof. Dr. Torsten Mütze, Universität Kassel

Institution

• UHH

Abstract

Producing good software documentation is a difficult balancing act: documents must contain enough information to address the needs of a large audience, but too much information can overwhelm individual readers. Creating interactive documents can mitigate this challenge by allowing readers to select the information they need. In this talk, I will present Casdoc, an interactive format for annotated code examples. With this project, we explored an alternative approach to present information that does not rely on a linear order of the content. Through two studies, we identified several patterns of information access from readers. I will discuss these patterns, which highlight the promises and perils when designing interactive documents.

Bio

I am a software engineering researcher focusing on the human aspects of the discipline, particularly the exchange of knowledge among different groups of developers, typically via documentation. In my research, I try to understand how developers access the information they need to learn about the software they use or contribute to, and how tools can make this information easier to create and to consume. I completed my PhD in 2024 at McGill University with Prof. Martin Robillard and I will soon start as a Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) at the University of Canterbury.

Institutions

• UHH

Abstract

Consensus and its variants, including set agreement and approximate agreement, play a central role in our understanding of asynchronous shared memory distributed computing. I will discuss some classical and recent results about these problems, including algorithms, hierarchies, impossibility results, and space complexity lower bounds.

Bio

Faith Ellen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and is currently serving as the Associate Chair, Graduate Students, in the Department of Computer Science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. Her research interests span the theory of distributed computing, complexity theory and data structures. From 1997 to 2001, she was vice chair of SIGACT, the leading international society for theory of computation and, from 2006 to 2009, she was chair of the steering committee for PODC, the top international conference for theory of distributed computing. In 2014, she co-authoured the book, "Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing". Faith is a Fellow of the ACM.

Institution

• UHH

Abstract

The brain is an information processing machine, and its function emerges from the ability of networks of neurons to process information. Yet, characterizing and measuring how neurons in the brain interact to process information has been challenging. Here I will present my computational work in developing analytical methods than can be applied to brain recordings during cognitive tasks. These methods allow us to infer how real neurons interact to encode information, transmit it downstream and generate behaviors such as perception and decision-making. They also allow us to understand differences between computations made by real neurons and computations made by machine-learning algorithms performing the same tasks.

Bio

Stefano Panzeri is a computational neuroscientist, researching at the interface between theory and experiment. His main research interest is understanding the principles of cortical information processing. He pursues this interest by developing new quantitative data analysis techniques based on the principles of Information Theory and machine learning and by developing computational models of neural network function. Stefano received a Laurea in Physics from the University of Torino, and a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from SISSA, Trieste, Italy. He has held personal research awards in both theoretical physics and computational neuroscience, including an INFN junior Fellowship in Theoretical Physics at Turin University, an EU Marie Curie postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford, and an MRC-funded Junior Group Leader position at the University of Newcastle. He has held tenured Faculty positions as assistant, associate and full professor at the Universities of Manchester and Glasgow. He has been visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and at Harvard Medical School for several years. He served as Coordinator of the Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems of IIT. He also served as Deputy Chair of the UK Medical Research Council Panel for fellowships in Bioinformatics and Neuroinformatics. He currently works as Full Professor and Director of the Institute for Neural Information Processing at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), Hamburg, Germany.

Institution

• UHH

Climate change research today relies on climate information from the past. Historical climate records of temperature observations form global gridded datasets that are examined, for example, in IPCC reports. However, the datasets combining measurement records are sparse in the past. Even today, they contain missing values. We found that recently successful image inpainting technologies, such as those found on smartphones to get rid of unwanted objects or people in photos, are useful here. The derived AI networks are able to reconstruct artificially cropped versions in the grid space for any given month using the missing values observation mask. So herewith we have found with AI a technique that gives us data from the past that we never measured with instruments.  Other important datasets used in the Assessment Report 6 of the IPCC to study climate change, as well as advanced applications such as downscaling in atmosphere and ocean, a hybrid (AI&ESM) data assimilation approach within ICON, or precipitation in broken radar fields are shown in this presentation.

Climate research, including the study mentioned in the previous paragraph, often requires substantial technical expertise. This involves managing data standards, various file formats, software engineering, and high-performance computing. Translating scientific questions into code that can answer them demands significant effort. The question is, why? Data analysis platforms like Freva (Kadow et al. 2021, e.g., gems.dkrz.de) aim to enhance user convenience, yet programming expertise is still required. In this context, we introduce a large language model setup and chat bot interface based on GPT-4/ChatGPT, which enables climate analysis without technical obstacles, including language barriers. This approach is tailored to the needs of the broader climate community, which deals with massive data sets from kilometer-scale modeling and requires a processing environment utilizing modern technologies, but addressing society after all - such as those in the Earth Virtualization Engines (EVE eve4climate.org).

Kadow, C., Hall, D.M. & Ulbrich, U. Artificial intelligence reconstructs missing climate information. Nat. Geosci. 13, 408-413 (2020)

Next talk in the Informatik-Kolloquium of the Department of Informatics at the University of Hamburg!
We have Prof. Dr. Fabian Kern, the Head of the Research Group Machine Learning in Bioinformatics here at the University of Hamburg, who will hold their inaugural lecture next Monday, December 8th. After the lecture, Prof. Dr. Kern welcomes all attendees to a reception.

Institution

• UHH