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 ELLIS Fellow 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.