+++ Open job positions: 1x Postdoctoral Researcher, 2x Student Assistants +++

2026 Leibniz Prize

BIFOLD co-director Klaus-Robert Müller honored with Germany’s most prestigious research award

Elected to Leopoldina

BIFOLD Co-director Volker Markl has been elected as a member of Leopoldina.

AI "thinks" like us

Computer vision models learn the hierarchical structure of human conceptual knowledge. This not only makes the representations of these models more human-like, and therefore more interpretable, but also improves their predictive power and robustness.

Berlin AI Square

Creating one of Europe’s most dynamic AI clusters

SIGMOD 2025 review

Berlin hosted this year’s SIGMOD/PODS conference, one of the leading conferences in data management.

BIFOLD DAY 2025

On April 30, 2025, BIFOLD celebrated BIFOLD Day 2025 - welcoming researchers, policymakers, and industry representatives at the Forum Digitale Technologien in Berlin.

The Age of AI

Video: Panel Discussion featuring Sam Altman (OpenAI), Nicole Büttner (Merantix Momentum), Fatma Deniz (TU Berlin) and Volker Markl (BIFOLD).

ERC Starting Grant

Alexander v. Lühmann has been awarded an ERC Grant for his project to combine wearable neurotechnology and multimodal ML.

April 15, 2026

Second BIFOLD Data Systems retreat

Researchers from four BIFOLD research groups gathered on April 7- 8 for their second annual retreat, spanning expertise from classical database management to modern data science processes.

April 14, 2026

New AI Method Enables More Precise Simulation of Complex Molecules

A new machine learning method enables global atomic interactions in chemical systems to be represented more efficiently. This could allow chemical and materials science processes to be simulated more accurately in the future, potentially accelerating the development of new drugs, more efficient batteries, and more sustainable materials.

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EVENTS

January 26 - April 26, 2026 | Rahel Hirsch Center for Translational Medicine Foyer Luisenstr. 65 10117 Berlin

kennedy+swan: The Red Queen Effect

Starting January 26, 2026, the foyer of the Rahel Hirsch Center will host a new exhibition dedicated to a topic central to research at BIH and Charité: Artificial Intelligence.

April 16, 2026 | MERANTIX AI CAMPUS. Max-Urich Str. 3. 13355 Berlin

>prompt 2026

>prompt is a one-day developer conference exploring how engineers build software with AI coding assistants: tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and Gemini.

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Publications

Awards

Dissertations

*Data collected from 2020 onwards.

OPPORTUNITIES

BIFOLD welcomes job applications from interested parties year-round.

Research Associate (E14, RSiM, IV-98/26)

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PUBLICATIONS

Nikolai Merkel, Ruben Mayer, Volker Markl, Hans-Arno Jacobsen

EmbedPart: Embedding-Driven Graph Partitioning for Scalable Graph Neural Network Training

April 01, 2026

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01000

Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel, Yan Shu, Angelos Zavras, Ioannis Papoutsis, Paolo Rota, Begüm Demir

BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

April 01, 2026

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.29630

Leonardo Medrano Sandonas, David Balcells, Anton Bochkarev, Jacqueline M. Cole, Volker L. Deringer, Werner Dobrautz, Adrian Ehrenhofer, Thorben Frank, Pascal Friederich, Rico Friedrich et al.

Perspective: Towards sustainable exploration of chemical spaces with machine learning

March 31, 2026

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.00069

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GRADUATE SCHOOL

Based on a highly competitive application process, the BIFOLD Graduate School offers an innovative fast-track PhD Program for students holding a bachelor’s degree, as well as a PhD Program for students with a master’s degree.

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