Actions, Awards, Events

2020 has been a year of change, and of progress. It gave us ample opportunity for actions and new ventures.

Awards

Even though the year 2020 presented us all with special challenges and we had to forego and adjust to many familiar things, we also had uplifting and joyful moments. The prizes and awards to our Fellows are clearly among them.

The German Pattern Recognition Award was granted to Alumnus Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Prof. Matthias Nießner for his pioneering research on tracking, reconstructing and visualizing photorealistic 3D face models from video with machine learning and AI.

Prof. Jia Chen, Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Professor for Environmental Sensing and Modelling, was included in this year's list of the “Young Elite - Top 40 under 40” in the category “Society and Science”. The German finance magazine Capital has been presenting this award since 2007. Jia Chen conducts research on topics relating to climate change and urban air pollution. She also develops sensors and mathematical models for the exact determination of greenhouse gas emissions and air quality parameters. The data generated can be used to develop new climate protection measures and to evaluate existing measures.

Prof. Job Boekhoven, Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Professor for Supramolecular Chemistry, started his 5 year project on “From Chemistry to Information: a Model System for the Coupling of Metabolism and Heredity”, which was granted by Volkswagen Foundation. With partners in Cambridge/UK and at the TUM Physics Department he looks at the interdependency of genetic information storage and propagation (heredity) and chemical energy dissipation (metabolism), which is a hallmark of life. However, how coupling between metabolic and informational systems emerged and sustained has never been explored experimentally in a cross-disciplinary context. Experts in both experimental and theoretical aspects of systems chemistry and synthetic biology will explore these crucial aspects of the emergence of life through synthetic model systems by addressing the following questions: a) How can heredity arise from pools of information encoding polymers? b) How can heredity be coupled to energy dissipation through chemical cycles? c) How can physicochemical transitions such as liquid-liquid demixing drive such cycles? d) How can a coupled metabolic-genetic system sustain itself?

Prof. Kathleen Thelen, TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellow and Professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been honored with the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology. The Friedrich Schiedel-Stiftung, TUM and the Bavarian School of Public Policy at TUM award the prize annually to outstanding personalities who have contributed to the understanding of the mutual interactions between politics, society and technology. She works in the field of comparative political economy, where she concentrates on the origins and evolution of political-economic institutions in rich democracies. In the past few years she has pursued an important research agenda on the governance of new technologies, in particular addressing the question of how large technology companies can be regulated. Her widely acclaimed publications include for example “Regulating Uber: The Politics of the Platform Economy in Europe and the United States” and “Are We All Amazon Primed? Consumers and the Politics of Platform Power”.

The European Research Council awards not only Europe’s most competitive and most prestigious awards, but also its most highly remunerated. Last year, three of our Fellows at the TUM-IAS have been receiving an ERC grant.

Hans Fischer Fellow Dr. Luca Magri (University of Cambridge) was awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant for his project PhyCo. In this project, he combines machine learning methods with the art of constructing physical models, which has the potential to revolutionize the engineering design of multi-physics systems.

Prof. Kathrin Lang, Alumna Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Professor for Synthetic Biochemistry, received an ERC Consolidator Grant for her research on the protein called “ubiqutin”. A crucial step in regulating protein functions consists of labeling selected proteins with a small protein called ubiquitin. Due to the ubiquity of this protein, many diseases are associated with disorders of processes it is involved in. In her Ubl-tool project, Kathrin Lang aims at developing a modular and interdisciplinary toolbox using chemical and synthetic biology to investigate widely varying aspects of ubiquitin labeling that cannot be studied by more traditional approaches. Another objective is to find new target points within the ubiquitin system for the discovery of future treatments.

Events

Science thrives especially on personal exchange, which became almost impossible in presence after March 2020, due to the Corona restrictions. The consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic were especially noticeable at events of our Fellows, but also in the dialogue with the public. Not only were public issues heavily dominated by Covid-19; it also took a while for online conference formats to be developed and widely used. Nevertheless, TUM-IAS has maintained some high-profile events and regular dialogue with the public.

TUM-IAS International Workshop Report

In 2020, the TUM-IAS Focus Group “Built Environment Digital Twinning”, comprising Hans Fischer Senior Fellow Dr. Ioannis Brilakis (University of Cambridge) and his host at TUM Prof. André Borrmann, published a comprehensive report on their International Workshop on Built Environment Digital Twinning. The workshop was organized in December 2019 and co-financed by the TUM-IAS and the Siemens AG.

The concept of a digital twin - a digital replica of a real-world physical entity (El Saddik 2018) - is already widely used in the manufacturing sector. In the built environment sector, digital twins are gradually entering the scientific discussion as they can offer substantial value to all associated stakeholders. The workshop brought together digital twin experts across academia and the private sector, with specialists from the Civil & Environmental Engineering, Computer Science and Architecture disciplines. These experts were given the task to explore the key research and technology transfer challenges in the following areas:

• the digital twin itself,
• from real world to the digital twin,
• from the digital twin to the real world,
• tech transfer and market penetration

Notable speakers were invited to the workshop to present their vision in one of the aforementioned areas. Their presentations were followed by brainstorming sessions that aimed to provide all attendees an opportunity to brainstorm jointly and derive novel insights.

More Informations:

• information on the workshop
• workshop videos
• full workshop report

TUM Exploratory Workshops

TUM Innovation Networks aim to foster innovative, high-risk, high-gain research projects spanning multiple disciplines. They are a central element of our institutional strategy, TUM AGENDA 2030.

The teams who submitted the most promising project proposals by September 2020 were invited to participate in a dedicated, project-specific two-day TUM Exploratory Workshop at the TUM-IAS. During the two-day workshop, the project concept was developed further and finalized. Where necessary, further principal investigators could be included in the initial project team. The goal of the TUM Exploratory Workshop was to prepare for a 10-page concept paper reflecting the TUM-IAS motto “Risking Creativity”.

In November and December 2020, the six TUM Exploratory Workshops covered the following areas in a digital format:

• Neural Engineering for Mental Health
• SynLife - Innovation Network for the Synthesis of Life
• Geometric Deep Learning: Beyond Euclidean Data
• Machine Learning Powered Science: Supramolecular Materials for Sustainable Energy Solutions and Regenerative Medicine
• AID-AM – Artificial Intelligence Empowered Design for Additive Manufacturing
• Materials Platforms for Quantum Engineering

This competition resulted in three TUM Innovation Networks, which started operation in April 2021.