B-IT Research School

 

Bonn-Aachen International Research School of Applied Informatics (B-IT)

Doctoral Education and Training

B-IT Research School offers a PhD program for outstanding students in the B-IT Master's Programs in Media Informatics and Life Science Informatics, but also accepts applications from excellent international students from outside B-IT to apply. The PhD program is entirely taught in English.

B-IT Research School is run by RWTH Aachen University and the University of Bonn with participation of the Fraunhofer Institutes located at Schloss Birlinghoven near Bonn. B-IT is led by Professor Dr. Matthias Jarke (RWTH Aachen University) and Professor Armin B. Cremers (University of Bonn).

Participating PhD candidates are offered to pe part of an inspiring learning and research environment at both universities and the participating Fraunhofer Institutes.

Key Research Areas

The research school covers a wide range of (interdisciplinary) topics, with a focus on both basic research as well as different areas of application:

• Media Informatics and Advanced Human-Computer Interaction
  Media Informatics studies the new software architectures, algorithms and data structures, tools, and user interfaces required and enabled by the use of multiple media, in particular time-based media such as audio and video, in computer systems and applications.
• Communication Systems Engineering
  Communication networks, in particular mobile communication and the Internet, have revolutionized our daily life and business. New ways of exchanging data through different types of networks are continuously evolving. Research areas include New Network Architectures (designing the future global network), Self-Organizing Systems (engineering the foundations of autonomous networks), and Middleware and New Services (scalable bridging in today’s networks).
• Software and Information Engineering
  New challenges and opportunities arise from the immense expansion of semi-structured data, text and images through the world wide web and the rapid evolution of services available on a global scale. From the Software Engineering perspective, these developments exploit the methodologies and emerging standards of object-oriented paradigms, models, and languages, service and model-driven architectures, aspect-oriented and agile programming.
• Life Science Informatics (LSI) 
  LSI is best described as the unification of “classical“ bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and medical informatics. This reflects the complexity and strong interdisciplinary character of R&D in the Life Science arena and the strong interplay between theoretical and experimental concepts. Current research topics deal with the integration of genomic models and algorithms, structural models and chemical properties, cellular function and biological network models into a system-oriented view.
• Computer Graphics
  Synthesizing images and animations from abstract scene descriptions still constitutes the very core of Computer Graphics, but recent developments have enlarged the target range of the synthesis from purely visual output to multiple modes including sound, haptic feedback, or even smell.
• IT Security
  Today cryptography and secure communications are enabling technologies without which activities like electronic commerce cannot flourish. The challenges are manifold; from an applied perspective, for example, more powerful cryptography has to function on less powerful devices, such as mobile implements, in ad-hoc or peer-to-peer networks, on smart cards or RFIDs.
• Data Mining, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
  Data mining, pattern recognition and learning are subfields of computer science concerned with algorithms and systems for the computer assisted analysis of large data sets, with the goal of uncovering hidden patterns or knowledge useful for classification, prediction and decision making, and with algorithms capable of processing input data with the goal of making a system adaptive to its environment and/or task.
• Algorithm Design and Formal Foundations of Applied IT
  This research area is concerned with fundamental problems, methodologies and paradigms playing major roles in most B-IT research areas. FOcus areas include, among others, the design and analysis of efficient algorithms, with the central objective of overcoming barriers of intractability present in handling massive data or data distributed networks.

Spokesperson

Spokesperson for the B-IT Research School is Professor Matthias Jarke, Chair of Computer Science 5 at RWTH Aachen University.