Mohammed Iftekhar has successfully completed his PhD on the topic ‘High-speed clock and Data Recovery: Theory and Implementation’ under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christoph Scheytt. We offer our warmest congratulations! Abstract:  This work presents the theory and implementation of a reference-less, full-rate Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) Bang-Bang Clock and Data Recovery (BBCDR) designed for high-speed optical transceivers in hybrid and…

Digital transformation opens up a wide range of opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to safeguard their competitiveness and tap into new, digital business models. But which technologies are suitable in the context of an individual business? What are the relevant legal framework conditions in each case? And how are digital strategies translated into operational practice? This is where the KLUG research project comes in: it…

How can the service life of mechatronic systems be taken into account as early as the product development stage, in order to enable a well-founded life cycle assessment at an early stage? Marcel Ebel, a research assistant in our ‘Product Development’ workgroup, provided answers in his presentation at this year’s VDI Mechatronics Conference in Berlin. He outlined an approach for integrating usage-related sustainability aspects even more…

On 14 October 2026, from 3.00 pm to 4.30 pm, the new online event ‘The Future in Dialogue – Engineering Practice Meets Philosophy of Technology’ will begin, moderated by Prof. Dr Suzana Alpsancar, Head of our workgroup ‘Philosophy and ethics of techno-scientific cultures’. The event is organized in cooperation with the VDI, the “Technik im Dialog” Advisory Board, and the Yearbook of Philosophy of Technology. The opening session will focus on…

Our “System and Circuit Technology” workgroup will be offering the lecture “Theory and Design of Integrated Photonic Devices” for the first time in the coming winter semester 2026/27. The course covers the functioning and theoretical principles of key integrated photonic components, including directional couplers, multimode interferometers and microring resonators. It also addresses methods and strategies for the targeted design and optimisation…

We are delighted to welcome Farnaz Soltaniani as a new member of our “Secure Software Engineering” workgroup. Farnaz is a postdoctoral researcher and has recently joined us at the Heinz Nixdorf Institute following the completion of her PhD at Clausthal University of Technology. Her research lies at the intersection of secure software engineering, machine learning and trustworthy AI. In her most recent work, Farnaz has investigated how AI and…

Data Science & Artificial Intelligence, extreme data, and Model-Based Systems Engineering in test scenarios: our “Product Development” workgroup presented no fewer than three papers in Ischia, in the Gulf of Naples. The topics covered the use of data science and artificial intelligence methods in disassembly and reassembly processes, a categorisation system and method for evaluating extreme data, and the integration of model-based systems…

We are delighted to welcome Tom Ohlmer as the latest addition to our “Secure Software Engineering” workgroup. Tom’s research focuses on the explainability-oriented improvement of AI systems in the field of code security. In particular, he investigates hybrid approaches that combine neural graph models with formal and knowledge-based methods to analyse and improve graph neural networks for classification tasks in static code analysis. Outside of…

No fewer than two papers from our “Data Science” workgroup have been accepted for the 35th “ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management” (CIKM 2026). Our research assistants Lia Shahnazaryan and Adel Memariani will be in Rome from 7 to 11 November to represent their respective papers. The accepted papers are entitled “PT2PR: A Benchmark for Multimodal Patent-to-Product Retrieval” by Lia Shahnazaryan and Stefan Heindorf,…

The paper “ATLAS: Adaptive Attribute-Aware Post-Hoc Alignment of Knowledge Graph Embeddings” by our “Data Science” workgroup has been accepted for the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in Shenyang, China. Our research assistant, Duygu Ekinci, will be in Shenyang from 12 to 15 November to represent the paper, authored by Duygu Ekinci, N’Dah Jean Kouagou, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif and Prof. Dr. Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo. ICDM has…

No fewer than three papers from our “Data Science” workgroup were presented at the “Semantics 2026” conference in Ghent, Belgium. Ali Manzoor, Arnab Sharma and Italo Lopes Oliveira, research assistants in our specialist group, were in Belgium from 15 to 17 September to present their papers. Italo Lopes Oliveira kicked things off on 16 September by presenting the paper “Ontology-Aware Prompting for Knowledge Graph Construction from Text” by…

Our “Data Science” workgroup was represented at the “European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2026)” in Naples, Italy, with two papers. Two of our research assistants were in attendance from 7 to 11 September and presented the following papers. On 9 September, Parsa Abbasi presented the paper entitled “CQD-SHAP: Explainable Complex Query Answering via Shapley Values”,…

The automotive sector accounts for around 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and requires large quantities of raw materials. Consequently, the circular economy is becoming increasingly important in reducing resource consumption, waste and scrap. Aluminium is particularly relevant: the European automotive industry uses around two million tonnes annually – three times more than any other sector. Owing to its strategic importance,…

Research assistants from our “Data Science” workgroup will be attending the European Knowledge Acquisition Workshop (EKAW 2026) in Turin, Italy, from 29 September to 1 October. Our workgroup will be represented there with three different papers. Adel Memariani will present the paper “When Confidence Turns Against You: Exploiting Link Prediction Scores for Data Poisoning” by Adel Memariani, Arnab Sharma, Michael Röder and Prof. Dr. Axel-Cyrille…

Attacks on substations, cyber-attacks on public authorities, drones flying over airports: critical infrastructure is increasingly becoming a target for criminals. So-called cyber-physical systems – technical devices in which software and machines communicate with one another in real time via the internet – are particularly at risk. Examples include modern industrial plants, cars and smart power stations. As digitalisation advances, so does the…