Jilles is Faculty (W3) at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, where he leads the Exploratory Data Analysis group. He is Honorary Professor of the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University, as well as faculty member of the ELLIS Unit Saarbrücken on Artificial Intelligene and Machine Learning.

My research is mainly concerned with causality and unsupervised learning. In particular, I enjoy developing theory and algorithms for answering exploratory questions, such as 'what is going on in my data?' or 'what is going on in my model?' without having to make unnecessary or unjustified assumptions. To identify what is worth knowing, I often employ well-founded statistical methods based on information theory, and then proceed to develop efficient algorithms for extracting useful interpretable results. I like all data types equally much.

Currently I'm investigating techniques for identifying informative and ideally causal structures in large collections of complex data; how to efficiently mine easily interpretable summaries from data; how to determine and discover causal dependencies from observational data; the theoretical and practical foundations of interactive exploration of very large data, discovering things by serendipity; how to mine large relational databases; how to mine very large graphs, including characterising influence propagation in social networks; as well as to study well-founded approaches for meaningfully comparing between, and validation of, explorative results.

Janis Kalofolias is a post-doctoral researcher in the EDA group. His research interests include many things, ranging from optimistic estimators for subgroup discovery, kernel-based methods for measuring similarities between graphs, to information theoretic methods for subjectively interesting structure from complex data.

Janis obtained his Bachelor of Science in 2011 from the University of Patras, Greece. In 2012 he joined Saarland University to pursue a Master of Science in Computer Science, and was a Research Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. He joined the EDA group as a PhD student in November 2016, and defended his dissertation titled 'Subgroup Discovery for Structure Targets' on December 8th 2022.

Corinna Coupette is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, working on theory and methods for graph analysis. Her research focuses on methods for interpretable graph similarity assessment and theory for model-agnostic graph algorithms. As a recovering lawyer, she is also involved in a number of interdisciplinary data science projects aiming to measure the law. More details, including a full list of publications, can be found at here.

Corinna holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from LMU Munich and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Saarland University. She received a Ph.D. in Law from Bucerius Law School in Hamburg with a dissertation on "Legal Network Science", for which she was awarded the 2018 Bucerius Dissertation Award and the 2020 Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society. Before starting her Ph.D. in Computer Science, she joined the EDA group as a research assistant in 2019.

Joscha Cüppers is a PhD student at the Saarland Graduate School of Computer Science and funded by CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. He is working on pattern mining. He is particularly interested in developing methods for discovering interactions and abstractions from data.

Joscha obtained his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2016 from Ulm University and his Master of Science from Saarland University in 2019. He originally joined the EDA group for his master thesis, and started his PhD in 2020.

Sebastian Dalleiger is a PhD student of the Saarbrücken Graduate School for Computer Science, funded by the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. In addition he is affiliated with the Department for Databases and Information Systems at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. His research interests include data mining and machine learning, and in particular information theoretic approaches to extracting useful models form data.

Sebastian obtained his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Marburg in 2012, and his Master of Science in Computer Science from Saarland University in 2015. He joined the EDA group as a PhD student in September 2017.

David Constantin Kaltenpoth is a PhD student funded by the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, member of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science, and a student of the Saarland University Graduate School of Computer Science. His research focus is on information theoretic approaches to causal inference.

David obtained his Master of Science in Mathematics from the Ludwigs-Maximilian Universität München in 2016. He joined the EDA group in June 2016 for a Research Immersion lab, and started his PhD in October 2017.

Sarah Mameche is a PhD student at the Saarland Graduate School of Computer Science and funded by CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. She is working on the topic of exploratory causal analysis, including causal inference and the discovery of stable mechanisms.

Sarah did both her Bachelor and Master degree in Computer Science at Saarland University, joining the EDA group in 2020 to write her Master thesis with us on the topic of discovering invariant causal mechanisms between different environments, such as between the populations analyzed by different hospitals.

Osman Ali Mian is a PhD student in the EDA group. His research interests include causal inference, data mining, and machine learning.

Osman obtained his Bachelor's degree in 2015 from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES) in Karachi, Pakistan. In 2017 he joined Saarland University to pursue a Master of Science in Computer Science. He joined the EDA group in September 2018 as a Research Assistant, and finished his Master thesis titled 'Causal Discovery using MDL-based Regression' in July 2019.

Boris is a PhD student in the EDA group, working on knowledge extraction from event logs. His research aims at developing methods to mine understandable models from complex event data. Application fields of his research include initial understanding of the control-flow in manufacturing and business processes, anomaly detection and bottleneck detection.

Boris obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Applied Computer Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Saarbrücken. In 2018, he completed his Master’s degree in Computer Science at Saarland University. After a year of practical work, he joined the EDA group in 2019. He is employed as a Data Scientist at AG der Dillinger Hüttenwerke and pursues to combine the best of research and industrial application.

Sascha Xiaguang Xu is a Ph.D. student who works on causal inference and explainability.

Sascha obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Saarland University, respectively in 2019 and 2022. During this time he worked with us a student research assistant on the topic of bivariate causal inference in the presence of heteroscedastic noise, which led to an ICML paper in 2022.

Muneeb Aadil pursues a Masters in Computer Science at Saarland University, and holds a scholarship from the International Max Planck Research School in Computer Science (IMPRS-CS). He is currently working on his Master thesis on the topic of learning causal invariants from temporal data.

Tim is pursuing his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Saarland University. He is very broadly interested in all aspects of machine learning, soaking up as much knowledge as he can. He is currently choosing the topic of his Bachelor's thesis, which may or may not include aspects of subgroup discovery, neural networks, graphs, information theory, causality, and many other topics.

Rafalia-Maria (Rafa for short) is pursuing her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Saarland University. She is very broadly interested in principled approaches to explainable machine learning. She is currently choosing the topic of her Bachelor's thesis.

Felix Falkenberg is pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science at Saarland University. His research interests revolve around different aspects of explainable machine learning. He is a Student Research Assistant in the EDA group working on developing methods to derive insights into what graph neural networks have learned.

Ravil Gasanov is currently an MS in Computer Science student at Saarland University. As part of his Master Thesis, he is investigating causal discovery in presence of hidden confounders — with a focus on information-theoretic approaches.

Ravil also holds a Bachelor's degree in Informatics and Control Systems from the Georgian Technical University (obtained in 2018), and is a DAAD alumnus (scholarship holder in 2020-2021).

Nisha George pursues a Masters in Computer Science at Saarland University. She is currently working on her Master thesis on the topic of learning robust neural networks.

Marco Schuster is pursuing a Master of Science in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Saarland University. He is currently working with us on his Master Thesis on causal discovery in event logs.

Marco obtained his Bachelor's degree at the City University of Applied Sciences in Bremen in 2020. Subsequently, he started his Master's program at Saarland University and joined the EDA group in 2021. His Master Thesis is conducted in cooperation with Airbus.

Aleena Siji is pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at Saarland University. She is interested in explainable machine learning and is working on a Master's thesis on the topic of discovering (possibly causal) rules in sequential data.

Jyotsna Singh is pursuing a Master of Science in Informatics at Saarland University. She is currently working with us as a Research Assistant, as well as on her Master Thesis. The topic of the latter is on explaining transformers.

Before starting her Masters in Saarbrücken in 2018, she finished her BSc in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur in 2017, interned at Nanyang University Singapore in 2016, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in 2017.

Huynh Quang Kiet Vo is a student of the Saarbrücken Graduate School for Computer Science. He is currently doing a Research Immersion Lab in the EDA group on the topic of reliably and accurately estimating treatment effects when the usual causal assumptions do not hold.

Anton Voran is pursuing his Bachelor's in Computer Science at Saarland University. He is interested in fair and trustworthy machine learning. He is currently working on a Bachelor's thesis on the topic of gaining insight into measuring how strongly a deep neural network is biased, and where these biases are encoded.

Nils Walter pursues a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science at Saarland University. At CISPA he is a Research Assistant working on the topic of mining exceptional models from antimicrobial resistance data. Meanwhile he is writing his Master's thesis at DFKI on the topic solving I-POMDPs in the context of autonomous driving.

Before joining CISPA, Nils was Research Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where his research was focused on adversarial robustness of Convolutional Neural Networks.

Matthias Wilms is pursuing a Master's of Science in Informatics at Saarland University. He is a Research Assistant with us working on the topic of scaling up functional dependency discovery such that we can consider massive datasets.

Matthias obtained his Bachelor's of Science in Informatics from Saarland University for his Bachelor Thesis on the topic of efficiently discovering top-k Markov blankets from data that he wrote in the EDA group.

Mohammad Yaseen Aftab pursues a Master degree in Computer Science at Saarland University, and holds a scholarship from the International Max Planck Research School in Computer Science. As a Research Assistant he is working on the discovery of anomalies in temporal data, and for his Master thesis he is exploring robustness in light of causal learning.