Digital Transformations

Exploring fundamental questions and new strategies, developing responsible applications: Major challenges are underlying ongoing digital transformations. They connect the social processes accompanying digitalization with development opportunities relating to research, teaching, outreach and infrastructure.

At the interfaces and intersections of statistics, data engineering or deep learning and medicine, biology or economics, UR’s researchers unravel systemic networks and develop novel tools while engaging with corresponding ethical, social, economic, and legal issues.

Fruit Fly under a microscope

At UR’s newly established Faculty of Informatics and Data Science (FIDS), scholars focus on

  • IT security
  • explainable AI
  • computational methods in the natural sciences
  • human centered AI.

 © Research Group Dorit Merhof | Project: Larvalbrain 2.0

How do certain AI models work? How do they arrive at a particular decision or prediction?

Research projects include post-quantum solutions for critical identity access management infrastructures or the analysis of big data as a crucial competitive factor and driver of innovation in the digital economy.

Deep learning researchers pioneer signal, image, and video processing as well as biomedical image analysis and statistical machine learning for data problems from various domains.

© UR | Photo: Tanja Wagensohn

In fields such as genetics, immunology or transplantation medicine, FIDS scholars are contributing new ideas and novel approaches to DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers/Transregios (CRC/TRR) in the life sciences.

They are principal investigators in projects such as “Platforms for bioinformatics methodology and GenePrioritiSation” "Interdisciplinary kidney research to advance understanding of disease mechanisms and develop new therapeutic concepts" (CRC/TRR 374) or “Data integration platform and systems medicine efforts to foster GvL and GvHD research” (CRC/TRR 221).

© UR | Photo: Tanja Wagensohn

BMBF: DEFENSIVE

Where digitization does not benefit, but harms, other projects come into play.

Among them is the BMBF-funded DEFENSIVE project. Its consortium is coordinated at UR. The idea – supporting companies which are struggling alone in IT security, leaving them vulnerable to many, often similar types of attacks.

To solve this problem, the idea of sharing cyber threat information data between organizations in a trustworthy manner has emerged, allowing leading to a digital shield (a so-called trustee platform) to be built around all participating organizations. The sharing of data can be handled via a so-called data trustee platform.

Prototyping and testing of such a decentralized data trustee model is part of DEFENSIVE.

© DEFENSIVE | Illustration: Günther Pernul / Johannes Grill

RTG 2339: IntComSin

The DFG-funded Research Training Group (RTG) 2339 "IntComSin: Interfaces, Complex Structures, and Singular Limits in Continuum Mechanics – Analysis and Numerics" deals with the still growing demand for refined mathematical models, their thorough analysis and efficient numerical implementation, their predictive power and potential of optimization which arises in various fields of natural sciences, medicine, and engineering.

In particular, applications in biology, cardiology, oncology, materials science, or in the manufacturing technology are addressed.

Mathematical Model of a Growing Tumor © Harald Garcke and Dennis Trautwein | Publication: doi.org/10.1515/jnma-2021-0094

CRC 1085: Higher Invariants

The study of invariants is a fundamental strategy to reduce the complexity of problems and to classify objects in mathematics. New foundational developments led to the possibility of defining finer and deeper lying higher invariants in a systematic way. These new foundations are far reaching and flexible enough to study higher invariants in fields as far apart as arithmetic geometry and global analysis on a common ground and even encompass foundational questions in computer science which are linked to proof assistants.

UR's Faculty of Mathematics with its CRC 1085 "Higher Invariants. Interactions between Arithmetic Geometry and Global Analysis" is one of the European centres of these new foundational developments and known for organising high calibre international conferences in these fields, which also includes interdisciplinary workshops with the Faculty of Informatics and Data Science.

© UR | Photo: Julia Dragan

#talktime

Join a conversation with Professor Denis-Charles Cisinski, mathematician at the University of Regensburg, whose passion for literature led to the language of geometry.

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Trefoil-doubletangle-curve. Courtesy of Claudius Zibrowius | © Claudius Zibrowius, Heegaard Floer multicurves of double tangles, 2022, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.08501  |  https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08501