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.

Lénaïg Cornanguer is a post-doctoral researcher. Her main research interests are causal inference, discovery of temporal logic from observational data, and explainable anomaly detection.

Lénaïg pursued her PhD at IRISA in Rennes, obtaining her degree from the Université de Rennes 1 for her dissertation titled 'Timed Automata Learning from Time Series' in November 2023. Prior to that, she obtained her Master's of Science in Data Science from the Agrocampus Ouest Engineering School in Rennes, France.

Janis Kalofolias is a post-doctoral researcher. 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.

Joscha Cüppers is a PhD student who is working on novel methods for mining patterns from data. He is particularly interested in developing methods for discovering interactions and abstractions from sequential 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 joined the EDA group in 2019 to write his Master's thesis and started his PhD with us in 2020.

David Constantin Kaltenpoth is a PhD student who works on causal inference under realistic conditions, such as confounding, selection bias, or non-i.i.d. data.

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 who is interested in exploratory causal analysis, such as discovering of invariant causal mechanisms from data.

Sarah did both her Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science at Saarland University. She joined the EDA group in 2020 to write her Master's thesis with us on the topic of discovering invariant causal mechanisms between different environments, such as between the populations analyzed by different hospitals. She started her Ph.D. in 2021.

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.

Nils Walter is a Ph.D. student who is interested in explainable, robust, and/or neuro-symbolic machine learning.

Nils obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Saarland University. Before he started his Ph.D. he was a student research assistant with us working on the topic of discovering patterns of anti-microbial resistance. Before joining CISPA, Nils was a Research Assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where his research was focused on the adversarial robustness of Convolutional Neural Networks.

Boris is a PhD student in the EDA group who works 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 gaining an 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 the intercept between causality 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.

Tim is a student in the Saarbrücken Graduate School for Computer Science. He is very broadly interested in all aspects of machine learning, soaking up as much knowledge as he can.

He obtained his Bachelor's degree from Saarland University in 2023 for his thesis 'What makes you say that? Explaining Transformers using Rule Mining and Input Prototyping'in which he showed how we can explain decisions of transformer network through pattern mining.

One of his passions outside of studying is tutoring. Tim was a tutor for Programming 1, Programming 2, the Machine Learning core lecture.

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.

Dinesh Adithya Haridoss is a student in the Saarbrücken Graduate School for Computer Science. He is currently doing a Research Immersion Lab with us, working on the topic discovering causal networks from temporal data.

Julius is pursuing his Bachelor's of Science degree in Data Science and AI at Saarland University. For his Bachelor's thesis, he is investigating how we can learn fully oriented causal models from discrete data.

Tim is pursuing his Bachelor's of Science degree in Data Science and AI at Saarland University. For his Bachelor's thesis, he is investigating how we can discover and characterize anomalies identified by deep vision models.

Ahmed is pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at Saarland University. He is currently working on his Master's thesis on the topic of Confounding Detection in Multiple Environments with Linear Additive Noise Models. As part of his HiWi, he is working on causal discovery from event sequences.

Previously he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Electronic Systems Software Engineering) from the University of Khartoum, Sudan.

Luis Paulus is pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at Saarland University. He is currently working on his Master's thesis, exploring how we can discover high-quality sets of rules from massive binary datasets through continuous optimization.

Benedikt Schardt is pursuing his Master's in Computer Science at Saarland University. He is a Research Assistant (HiWi) with us, working on the topic of discovering statistically significant patterns and correlations from high-dimensional genetic expression data.

Aleena Siji is pursuing an M.Sc degree in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Saarland University. She is working with us on her Master's thesis, on extracting out (possibly causal) rules from sequential data.

Aleena obtained a B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from College of Engineering Trivandrum (Kerala, India) and worked as a Software Engineer in Bengaluru for 3 years before starting her Master's studies in November 2020. She is interested in Data Mining, Robust & Explainable Machine Learning, Causality and Automated Planning. She has also worked as a Research Assistant with FAI group at Saarland University in Automated Planning.

Hendrik is pursuing a Master's in Informatics and Mathematics at Saarland University. He is currently working on his Master's thesis on the topic of anomaly detection and repair.

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.

Matthias Wilms is pursuing a Master's of Science in Informatics at Saarland University. He is currently choosing the topic of his Master's thesis, which will most likely be in the realm of causality. He is additionally 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.