Seminars

The central registration for all computer science proseminars will open on March 14th.

This system is used to distribute students among the available proseminars. To register for any of the proseminars that are offered by the computer science department, you have to register here. You can select which proseminar you would like to take until April 12th 23:59 CET, and will then be automatically assigned to one of them on April 15th.

Please note the following:

We aim to provide a fair mapping that respects your wishes, but at the same time also respects the preferences of your fellow students.
Experience has shown that particular proseminars are more popular than others, yet these proseminars cannot fit all students. We thus encourage students to select their preferences for all available proseminars, which eases the process to assign students that do not fit the overly popular proseminars to another, less crowded one. Each student must therefore select at least three proseminars (with priority from "High" to "Low").
If you urgently need to be assigned to a proseminar in the upcoming semester, choose at least five proseminars (with priority from "High" to "Low"). We will then guarantee that you will be assigned to a proseminar (yet not necessarily one of your choice).
If you are really dedicated to one particular proseminar, and you do not want any other proseminar, please select the "No proseminar" as second and third positive option. However, this may ultimately lead to the situation that you are not assigned to any proseminar. Also, choosing "No seminar" as second/third option does not increase your chances of getting your first choice.

The assignment will be automatically performed by a constraint solver. You will be added to the respective proseminars automatically and be notified about this shortly thereafter. Please note that the assignment cannot be optimal for all students if you drop the assigned proseminar, i.e., make only serious choices to avoid penalty to others.

Classical Papers in Systems Security by Thorsten Holz

This proseminar will focus on an introduction to software security, network security, privacy, reverse engineering, and similar systems security topics. Students are expected to independently investigate a narrowly defined topic, usually based on classic scientific papers from this area. Given that the main purpose of a proseminar is to learn presentation skills, two presentations are expected from each student. Since presentation skills and writing skills are closely related, a very short report - no more than 2 pages - must also be submitted for each presentation.

During the first half of the semester, two topics are presented each week. After each presentation, fellow students and the instructor provide feedback on how to improve the presentation. This general feedback must then be taken into account in the second half of the semester, when again each student gives a presentation.

Requirements: Basic knowledge of software security is helpful.

Places: 8

Classic Contributions to Machine Learning by Rebekka Burkholz, Aleksandar Bojchevski

Machine learning has not only prepared the modern breakthroughs in computer vision and natural language processing. It has also a successful history of enabling data driven insights. We will discuss classic concepts and seminal papers in the field that cover different techniques ranging from linear regression to deep learning. We will discover joint underlying principles and challenge some of them by modern observations related to overparameterization.
Are the simplest models always the best choice? And is counting parameters really the best way to measure model complexity?
Join the seminar if you enjoy thinking about these kind of questions.

Updated information about the course and its organization can be found here:
https://cms.cispa.saarland/peml/

Requirements: No formal requirements. The course aims to foster discussions between Bachelor students with basic knowledge of math and statistics .
The course language will be English or German according to the preference of the students.

Places: 10

Cyber-Physical Systems Security by Dr. Hamid Reza Ghaeini

here exist a multitude of cyber-physical system devices and applications deployed to serve critical roles, thus making security a crucial non-functional attribute of such systems. The Next Generation of Internet-of-Things (NGIoT) is responsible for critical applications such as home and office security, Industrial Control Systems (ICS), Internet-of-Things (IoT), transportation, manufacturing, infrastructure, medical, and so on. The Internet-of-Everything (IoE) will cover a wide range of daily life applications with a focus on edge in the time of ongoing decentralization. However, the safety and security of these systems are still in a gray state, and the world-wide threat against these systems could compromise our daily life applications.

This proseminar is meant to provide students with an overview of recent advances in cyber-physical systems security. We will discuss the classic and state-of-the-art papers of cyber-physical systems security during this proseminar.

Places: 10

Das Buch der Beweise by Markus Bläser

Der berühmte Mathematiker Paul Erdös hatte die Idee, dass es ein Buch geben könnte, in dem zu jedem mathematischen Satz der perfekte Beweis zu finden sei („You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book“). Martin Aigner und Günther Ziegler haben sich an einer Approximation zu diesem Buch versucht: Das Buch der Beweise (Proofs from the book), erschienen im Springer Verlag. In diesem Proseminar werden wir gemeinsam einen Teil dieser Beweise bearbeiten.

Das Proseminar findet als Blockveranstaltung (nach Abprache mit den Teilnehmern) in den Semesterferien im Sommer statt

Requirements: MfI 1-3 und Grundzüge der Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen ist hilfreich

Places: 12

From Program Verification to Synthesis by Bernd Finkbeiner and Hadar Frenkel

Proving that a program is correct is hard. Generating a correct-by-construction program is even harder. In this proseminar we cover a foundational approach to these problems, based on automata theory. We study different algorithms for program verification and synthesis, with respect to different specifications (such as LTL and HyperLTL), as well as a compositional approach for both verification and synthesis problems.

The proseminar will be held in English and on a weekly basis.

Requirements: Programmierung 1

Places: 12

Geometric Deep Learning by Aleksandar Bojchevski

Geometric Deep Learning (GDL) is concerned with designing and analyzing neural networks for unstructured sets, grids (2D, 3D), graphs, and manifolds. They can be understood in a unified manner as methods that respect the structure and symmetries of these domains. GDL techniques are at the core of many recent breakthroughs from the discovery of new drugs to improved traffic forecasting. For a short introduction to the topic I recommend the following keynote talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Pw4MOzMuo.

Organization:
The goal of the proseminar is to teach you how to deliver a scientific presentation. You study a given topic, summarize it, and present it to the other participants.

First, we will provide advice and resources that will help you prepare and deliver a scientific presentation. Then, after you are assigned to an individual topic, you will give an initial practice presentation and receive detailed feedback from all participants. You will have the chance to incorporate this feedback before giving a final graded presentation. At the end of the semester you also need to submit a 2-page summary.

In the first part of the semester, we will have practice presentations for 2-3 topics each week. The second part of the semester will consist of two block sessions where participants will give their final presentations. Attendance is mandatory and the meetings will be virtual or hybrid. The exact meeting dates will be determined in the kick-off meeting.

News and additional information can be found on the seminar website: https://cms.cispa.saarland/gdl_ss22/

Requirements: No formal requirements. In the text box below please provide a concise overview (short bullet list) of your previous experience with machine learning, as well as relevant courses (ML, CS, Math) you might have taken.

Places: 10

Interacting for Fun - Spiel und Spaß mit dem Computer by Maximilian Altmeyer, Florian Daiber, Felix Kosmalla, Pascal Lessel, Marc Schubhan

Spiele jeglicher Art erfreuen sich heutzutage einem immer größer werdenden Publikum und haben nicht zuletzt durch die Pandemie großen Zulauf erhalten. Dank ihrer Diversität und ihrer Verfügbarkeit auf einer Vielzahl von Medien bieten sie eine breite Palette an Use Cases in verschiedenen Anwendungszenarien und rücken so auch in den Fokus der Wissenschaft. Im Proseminar soll sich zu Beginn umfassend in das Thema Games User Research eingearbeitet werden. Im Anschluss werden wissenschaftliche Arbeiten verschiedener Themenbereiche rund um Boardgames, Games for Health, Games for Movement, Juicy Game Design und Location-based Games aufbereitet. Dies geschieht im Laufe des Semesters sowohl durch von Student*innen vorbereitete Videos, als auch im späteren Verlauf durch persönliche Vorträge mit anschließender Diskussion & Fragerunde.

Mehr Infos hier: https://umtl.cs.uni-saarland.de/teaching/summer-2022/proseminar-interacting-for-fun.html

Requirements: -

Places: 15

Recent Topics in Web Security by Ben Stock

This course is about the discussion and presentation of recent topics in Web Security. Each student will be assigned one topic to present and two additional topics for discussion. For the presentation topic, each student will have two presentations: one during the semester and one in a full-day session in the semester break. For each topic, there will be two papers (one to be presented during the semester, the other in the break). Each student will also be assigned two topics for discussion: this implies that the student reads the paper to be presented and needs to prepare three questions to be discussed with the presenter. Furthermore, after each presentation, all students provide feedback to the presenter on what to improve in the presentation. Attendance during the presentations and feedback after is mandatory. Failing to join the proseminar without a sick note may be grounds for flunking the course.

For all details including the schedule and the papers to be discussed, please see https://cms.cispa.saarland/retows/

Note: the presentation language is English.

Requirements: Students should have a decent understanding of core security principles (i.e., have taken CySec 1, CySec 2, or the Security core lecture). The papers are current works at top venues in the area of Web Security, so students must be able to comprehend works which require certain basic understanding of security principles.

Places: 10

Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage by Sven Apel, Annabelle Bergum, Thomas Bock, Sebastian Boehm, Christian Hechtl, Christian Kaltenecker, Norman Peitek, Florian Sattler, Kallistos Weis

The pivotal role of software in our modern world imposes strong requirements on quality, correctness, and reliability of software systems. The ability to understand program code plays a key role for programmers to fulfill these requirements. Despite significant progress, research on program comprehension has had a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for (mis)interpretation, uncertainty, and confounding factors. Thus, central questions such as “What makes a good programmer?” and “How should we program?” are surprisingly difficult to answer based on the state of the art.
Recently, researchers began to lift research on program comprehension to a new level. The key idea is to leverage recent methods from cognitive neuroscience to obtain insights into the cognitive processes involved in program comprehension. Opening the “black box” of human cognition will lead to a breakthrough in understanding the why and how of program comprehension and to a completely new perspective and methodology of measuring program comprehension, with direct implications for programming methodology, language design, and education.
In this seminar, we will review and discuss the past, current, and future developments in this area.

In this seminar, each participant has to perform a literature search and propose an experiment for the given topic.
Subsequently, the topic, the results of the literature search, and the proposed experiment have to be incorporated into a presentation and a written thesis.
To aid the literature search, the experiment proposal, and the presentation, this seminar includes multiple preparatory sessions at the beginning of the semester.
The student presentations will be held in June and July 2022.
All sessions will take place on-site at the university (under the caveat that the pandemic situation admits in-person sessions) on Thursdays 12:15 PM - 2:00 PM.
Participation to all sessions is mandatory.

The topic assignment will take place on Thursday April 21, at 12:15 PM. Further information will be provided via e-mail after registration.

Requirements: Basic knowledge on software engineering and programming.

Places: 5