Collaborative Research Center

SFB-TRR 161

Quantitative Methods for Visual Computing

We are living in a data society in which data is generated at amazing speed; individuals, companies, organizations, and governments are on the brink of being drawn into a massive deluge of data. The great challenge is to extract the relevant information from vast amounts of data and communicate it effectively.

Typical scenarios include decision and policy making for urban and environmental planning or understanding relationships and dependencies in complex networks, e.g., social networks or networks from the field of bioinformatics. These scenarios are not only of interest to specialized experts; in fact, there is a trend toward including the broad public, which requires the information to be presented in a reliable, faithful, and easy-to-understand fashion.

Visual computing can play a key role in extracting and presenting the relevant information.

In visual computing research the aspect of quantification is often neglected. The SFB-TRR 161 seeks to close this gap.

The long-term goal is to strengthen the research field by establishing the paradigm of quantitative science in visual computing.

About the SFB-TRR 161

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SFB-TRR 161 Events

Sep 10th - 11, 2026, 9 am to 5 pm

University of Stuttgart, VISUS, Allmandring 19

Research Seminar on Advanced Statistics

Held by:

Benedikt Ehinger, Project D05

Abstract:
The seminar will focus on Linear mixed models and participants are assumed to have background knowledge in statistics.

Registration:

To sign up, please send an email to Sita Vriend and include your project number if you are involved with the SFB. The seminar is open to anyone interested so you are welcome to share this email with colleagues not part of the SFB. However, we will prioritize SFB members.

Oct 19, 2026, 4 pm - 6 pm

University of Konstanz

Lecture | Beyond the Prompt: Grounding AI in the Human Body

Held by:

Jürgen Steimle, Saarland University

Abstract:

The dominant interaction paradigm with AI today, textual prompting, requires people to translate their intentions into words. This is at odds with the embodied and situated nature of real-world activity. This talk advocates for Body Intelligence: machine intelligence that is physically integrated with the human body and computationally grounded in it, enabling AI to perceive, reason about, and act within human activity as it unfolds.

I will present research from my group that advances this vision across three key dimensions necessary for Body Intelligence. The first dimension makes the body itself the interface. I will present skin-conformal technologies and wearable robotics that turn the body into a surface for both sensing and physical output. The second dimension makes the body the medium in which humans and machines communicate their mutual intentions. The system reads intent from a person's ongoing motion and, in turn, makes its own forthcoming actions physically perceptible. The third dimension grounds machine reasoning in the context in which the body acts. I will show how systems can leverage such context to generate bodily experience and action, rather than relying on the user to describe what is needed. Together, these advances point toward a future where AI is not just an external tool but a deeply integrated partner in human physical and contextualized activity.

Bio:

Jürgen Steimle is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at Saarland University, where he directs the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science from 2022-24. Previously, he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology. His research investigates touch and haptic interfaces, human-robot interaction, and digital fabrication using new materials. His contributions have been recognized with an ERC Starting Grant, best paper awards at ACM CHI and UIST, and the Best Computer Science Dissertation Award 2009 by the German, Austrian and Swiss Computer Societies. He served as Program Chair for UIST 2023 and TEI 2017, General Chair for ISS 2017, and is on the Editorial Board of TOCHI.

Location:

University of Konstanz, Room ZT 1201 or ZT 1202 (tba)

University of Stuttgart: The lecture will be transmitted to VISUS, room 00.012

The talks are available via Zoom.

Meeting ID: tba
Passcode: tba

For participants via Zoom: The transmission will kindly be managed by Dimitar Garkov.  He will be on site and monitor/manage the Zoom-Session incl. Q&A during and after the talk as well. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with Dimitar in case of questions or problems regarding the transmission/your online participation: dimitar.garkov@uni-konstanz.de

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