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New type of algorithm for brain research
Together with an international team of researchers from Mayo Clinic BIFOLD Co-Director Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller developed a new type of algorithm to explore which regions of the brain interact with each other. Their results could improve brain stimulation devices to treat disease. For millions of people with epilepsy and movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, electrical stimulation of the brain already is widening treatment possibilities. In the future, electrical stimulation may help people with psychiatric illness and direct brain injuries, such as stroke.
Using Machine Learning in the fight against COVID-19
BIFOLD Fellow Prof. Dr. Frank Noé identified a potential drug candidate for the therapy of COVID-19. Among other methods, they used deep learning models and molecular dynamics simulations in order to identify the drug Otamixaban as a potential inhibitor of the human target enzyme which is required by SARS-CoV-2 in order to enter into lung cells. According to their findings, Otamixaban works in synergy with other drugs such as Camostat and Nafamostat and may present an effective early treatment option for COVID-19. Their work was now published in Chemical Science.
SIGCOMM 2021Best Paper: Internet Hypergiants expand into End-User networks
BIFOLD Fellow Prof. Dr. Georgios Smaragdakis and his colleagues received the prestigious ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Best Paper Award for their research into the expansion of Hypergiant’s off-nets. They developed a methodology to measure how a few extremely large internet content providers deploy more and more servers in end-user networks over the last years. Their findings indicate changes in the structure of the internet, potentially impacting network end-user experience and neutrality regulations.
VLDB2021: BOSS Workshop features Open Source Big Data systems
BIFOLD researchers will present three full research papers as well as three demo papers at the 47th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2021), which will take place from August 16 – 29, 2021. In conjunction with VLDB, BIFOLD researchers also co-organize the BOSS 2021 workshop on open source big data systems.
Earth Observation data for Climate Change research
Many environmental reports are based on the analysis of satellite images. BIFOLD researchers are creating AgoraEO, an infrastructure for Earth Observation (EO) data that enables federated analysis across different platforms, making modern EO technology accessible to all scientists and society, thus promoting climate change innovation worldwide.
BIFOLD welcomes the first six Junior Fellows
The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data is very pleased to announce the first six BIFOLD Junior Fellows. They were selected for the excellence of their research and are already well-established researchers in the computer sciences. In addition, their research interests show exceptional potential for BIFOLD’s research goals, either by combining machine learning and data management or by bridging the two disciplines and other research areas. The first six Junior Fellows will cover a broad range of research topics during their collaboration with BIFOLD.
Higher impact through reproducibility
Modern science is based on objectiveness. Experimental results should be repeatable by any scientist, provided they use the same experimental setup. Since 2008, the SIGMOD conference, the international leading conference in management of data, awards the reproducibility badge to signify that a scientific work has been successfully reproduced by a third-party reviewer. In 2021, the paper “Pump Up the Volume: Processing Large Data on GPUs with Fast Interconnects” by BIFOLD researcher Clemens Lutz was awarded a prestigious reproducibility badge.
In search of Europe’s scientific identity
In the past, scholars used to pore over dusty tomes. Today Dr. Matteo Valleriani, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science as well as honorary professor at TU Berlin and fellow at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), uses algorithms to group and analyze digitized data from historical works. The term used to describe this process is computational history. One of the goals of Valleriani’s research is to unlock the mechanisms involved in the homogenization of cosmological knowledge in the context of studies in the history of science.
COVID-19: A stress test for the internet
Following an announcement of the WHO, who declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, governments around the world began enacting stay-at-home orders, regulations for working from home and homeschooling. Within a single week, Internet traffic volume increased by 25 percent – an increase which under normal circumstances is usually observed over the course of a year. Taking account of increased use during the second lockdown in fall 2020, the overall use of Internet services in 2020 increased between 35 and 50 percent, depending on the network. An international, interdisciplinary group of researchers led by Professor Dr. Georgios Smaragdakis, professor of Internet measurement and analysis at TU Berlin and Fellow of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), has published these figures and other findings in a paper in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The leading professional association recently named the paper a research highlight.
ACM SIGMOD 2021: 7 Data Management Papers Accepted
The upcoming 2021 ACM International Conference on the Management of Data (SIGMOD) – a top ranked international conference on database systems and information management – accepted seven papers submitted by BIFOLD Researchers. Large amounts of high-quality data are the backbone of modern machine learning applications in research, industry, and sectors, like medicine and mobility. To enable the next generation of Artificial Intelligence applications, an increasing number of different data sources need to be accessed and analyzed in a shorter period of time, while reducing computation costs, maintaining fault tolerance, and achieving high data quality. The group of BIFOLD Researchers, led by BIFOLD Co-Director Prof. Dr. Volker Markl, tackled some of these data management challenges and developed innovative solutions.