News from HEIBRiDS

HEIBRiDS underwent a successful mid-term evaluation on 13-14 October, 2022. The initial feedback from the review panel was that HEIBRiDS has been true to its mission of educating young researchers on the interface of data science and domain expertise. The continuation of the school was strongly recommended and the full review report is expected to be finalized in the next weeks.

Digitalization is having a rapid impact in the field of medicine, with data sciences and AI offering ever-increasing benefits for the development of new vaccines and drugs. Pfizer manager Peter Albiez discusses how graduate schools like HEIBRiDS are helping meet the enormous demand for specialists in the data sciences.

Demand is high for young scientists who are well versed in the data sciences as well as in another discipline. At the Helmholtz graduate school HEIBRiDS in the Berlin-Brandenburg region, eleven prestigious institutions have teamed up to train young scientists at this intersection. The range of subjects they cover spans everything from genetic research to astronomy.

HEIBRiDS PI Heidi Kreibich mentioned HEIBRiDS as a good example for interdisciplinary education in her recent Correspondence in NATURE Sustainability.

HEIBRiDS students Tabea Rettelbach,Christian Utama,andBrian Groenke attended the first H^3, Helmholtz Herbst Hackathon, which brought together for four days MSc students, doctoral researchers, and postdocs from Helmholtz and elsewhere to apply their skills in solving real-world scientific challenges with AI/ML.

Explosive volcanic eruptions often announce themselves: The dynamic of gas and magma flows inside the mountain change noticeably before eruptions and cause, among other things, the rising and lowering of the volcano’s surface, which is recorded by satellites. The work of Binayak Ghosh and Mahdi Motagh on automatic detection of volcanic unrest has been covered by sciencemag.com.

Binayak Ghosh and his colleague Shagun Garg from the GFZ (team shagun1511), ranked in the third place at the NASA ETCI 2021 Competition on Flood Detection from Sentinel-1 data. The event, organized by NASA IMPACT in collaboration with the IEEE GRSS, seeks to develop approaches to delineate open water flood areas as an effort to identify flood extent, an impactful disaster that occurs frequently throughout the world.

HEIBRiDS doctoral student Leon Weber and associated doctoral student Mario Sänger participated in the MEDIQA Shared Task (Task 1) and their contribution achieved a superb second position among 23 participating teams.

Tabea Rettelbach participated in the innovation competition ‘Copernicus Masters 2020’ which focuses on innovative applications/businesses that make use of ESA’s Copernicus data (mainly remote sensing data). Together with colleague Alexandra Zuhr, they submitted an idea for an application to ensure safer navigation across frozen waters in the Arctic and won within the BMVI Digital Transport Challenge.

Femke van Gefen has received funding for three months in the group of Ronny Hänsch at the Department of SAR Technology, DLR/Munich.

Peter Tilmann has received funding for a three-month stay at the DLR Institute of Solar Research in Almeria, Spain. He will conduct research in the group of Stefan Hilbert on the classification of optical cloud transparency from sky images.

The Leakbusters team from TU-Berlin and North Carolina State University, led by associated HEIBRiDS PhD student Ivo Daniel and his supervisor Andrea Cominola, achieved the 3^rd place award in the BattLeDIM 2020, an international competition on leakage detection and isolation methods.

To spot fires and predict droughts, satellites need to communicate efficiently with Earth – and data science algorithms can help. Olga Kondrateva, doctoral researcher at the Helmholtz Einstein International Berlin School in Data Science (HEIBRiDS), is programming the satellites to pick and choose what data is worth transmitting.

Anna Vlot presented her research at the Women in Machine Learning & Data Science first European joined meetup. These meetups are open to everyone, but all speakers are women or gender minorities.

Gregor Pfalz has the air of a young researcher who is burning to get to the bottom of things. Which fits perfectly, because his work as a doctoral candidate at the HEIBRiDS Data Science School in Berlin involves analyzing data from sediment collected from Arctic lakes, with the aim of making predictions about the climate of the future. And how does this work? It takes a lot of patience and a merging of two disciplines - geology and computer science.