Seminars

The central registration for all computer science seminars will open on March 3rd.

This system is used to distribute students among the available seminars offered by the CS department. To register for any of the seminars, you have to register here until April 8th, 23:59 CET. You can select which seminar you would like to take, and will then be automatically assigned to one of them on April 11th.

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 seminars are more popular than others, yet these seminars cannot fit all students.
Please only select seminars if you are certain that you actually do want to complete a seminar this semester. If you have already obtained sufficient seminar credits, or plan to take other courses this semester, feel free not to choose any seminars. Students who drop out of seminars take away places from those, who might urgently need a space or are strongly interested in the topic.
We encourage those students who wish to take a seminar this semester, to select their preferences for all available seminars, which eases the process to assign students that do not fit the overly popular seminars to another, less crowded one. So if you are serious about taking a seminar this semester, please select at least three seminars (with priority from "High" to "Low").
If you urgently need to be assigned to a seminar in the upcoming semester, choose at least five seminars (with priority from "High" to "Low"). We will then guarantee that you will be assigned to a seminar (yet not necessarily one of your choice).
If you are really dedicated to one particular seminar, and you do not want any other seminar, please select the "No seminar" as second and third positive option. However, this may ultimately lead to the situation that you are not assigned to any seminar. Also, choosing "No seminar" as second/third option does not increase your chances of getting your first choice.

The assignment will be performed by a constraint solver on April 11th, 2025. You will be added to the respective seminars automatically and be notified about this shortly thereafter. Please note that the assignment cannot be optimal for all students if you drop the assigned seminar, i.e., make only serious choices to avoid penalty to others.

AI Coding Assistants: Hype or Game Changer? by Sven Apel, Kallistos Weis, Marvin Wyrich, Norman Peitek, Annabelle Bergum, Tobias Dick, Christian Hechtl, Anna-Maria Maurer, Alisa Welter

Who needs human peers for software development when you have an AI that is always available and never disagrees? AI coding assistants are revolutionizing the software world and promise to make our lives significantly better. But is that really the case? How helpful are code explainers? How accurate is automatically generated code? Can poor output be prevented through good prompt engineering?

In this seminar, you will first gain hands-on experience through guided exercises using AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot. Then, you will explore a research question related to AI coding assistants by reviewing scientific literature and conducting a small, self-designed study with your fellow seminar participants. Finally, the research question of your study, the results of the initial exploration, and lessons learned will be presented in a short talk and a written seminar paper.

Kick-Off Meeting: Thursday, April 17th
The seminar takes place Thursdays from 12:00 - 14:00 (~11 sessions in sum)

Participation in all sessions is mandatory.

Requirements: This seminar is open to motivated Bachelor and Master students who are eager to try out AI coding assistants in practice while critically and empirically examining their promised benefits. Previous experience with AI coding assistants is not necessary, but basic software engineering and programming knowledge is.

Places: 4

Algorithms and Complexity by Antoine Joux

This proseminar is meant to provide students an overview over foundational results in the area of algorithms and complexity. As a proseminar's primary purpose is to learn presentation skills, the seminar will feature two presentations from each student.

This proseminar will be organized on-site in block sessions.

After each presentation, the fellow students and lecturers will provide feedback on how to improve the presentation. This general feedback must then be taken into account for the second block of the course, where again each student will present.

For the first presentation, the student will present one of the proposed topics (which will be made available on CMS).

To not bore the audience, the second presentation will be on a related topic and based on a different reference document (book or research article).
This second reference will be chosen by the students (not from the initial list of references) and the relevance of the choice will be part of the grading of the second presentation.

The first presentations will count towards 30% of the overall grade, the choice of the second reference will count for 30% and the second presentation itself will count for the remaining 40% of the overall grade. Attendance in the proseminar meetings is mandatory. Because of the block structure, any absence needs a doctor's note as justification.

Requirements: Basic algebra. Notions of algorithms and algorithm analysis. Some knowledge of imperative programming.

Places: 14

Gescheiterte Digitalisierung by Jens Dittrich

In kaum einem Industrieland ist die "Digitialisierung" härter gescheitert als in Deutschland. In diversen Rankings rangieren wir auf mittleren bis hinteren Plätzen. Die Liste der nicht vorhandenen oder nicht oder schlecht funktionierenden Systeme und Dienstleistungen ist für jeden der folgenden Bereiche legendär: Schulen, Hochschulen, Verwaltung, Medizin, Bürgerdienste, Mobilfunkabdeckung, Internetzugänge, etc.

Dazu kommen regelmäßige Berichte von völlig absurden Digitaldesastern aus der Industrie, z.B. kürzlich "Wir wissen, wo dein Auto steht", bei der Bewegungsdaten von 800.000 E-Autos von VW sowie Kontaktinformationen zu den Besitzern ungeschützt im Netz standen. Ein weiteres aktuelles Beispiel ist die digitale Patienakte (ePA), die ebenfalls auch kürzlich gehackt wurde (u.a. mit einer Attacke aus der digitalen Steinzeit: SQL Injection).

Gescheiterte Digitalisierung besteht aus einer ganzen Reihe einzelner Dimensionen:

- soziale Aspekte: "Wir haben das schon immer so gemacht", "Wenn wir das digitalisieren, verlieren wir die Kontrolle über gewisse Entscheidungen".
- psychologischen Aspekten: Fehlendes Eingeständnis von Nichtwissen oder Nichtkompetenz
- kulturellen Phänomenen: "Also bevor wir das irgendetwas machen, müssen wir das alles erst einmal bis ins kleinste Detail durchdenken. Vorher machen wir nix.", "Das ist nicht auf Papier, also ist es nicht offiziell."
- organisatorischen Phänomen: "Hey, ich verstehe zwar inhaltlich nix von dem Projekt, aber natürlich kann ich das managen!", "Wir haben jetzt so viel in das Projekt investiert, natürlich machen wir das Projekt weiter, egal was es kostet."
- politischen Phänomenen: "Wir haben einen Digitialisierungsexperten benannt, es ist also alles gut."
- technischen Problemen: "Was ist dieses 'Internet?", "Was meinst du mit 'Datenbank'?"

In diesem Proseminar wollen wir diesen Dimensionen auf den Grund gehen mit dem Ziel:

1. Die einzelnen Dimensionen besser zu verstehen,
2. Die Probleme und Herausforderungen der einzelnen Dimensionen besser und schneller zu erkennen, und
3. Strategien zu entwickeln, um die Probleme der einzelnen Dimensionen zu vermeiden.

Hierzu werden wir konkrete Fallbeispiele angucken, Erfahrungsberichte analysieren und Lösungsmuster erarbeiten.

Requirements: Prog 1, Prog 2, BDE, Softwarepraktikum

Places: 12

Pearls of Functional Programming by Dominic Zimmer, Holger Hermanns

"Functional Pearls" are the focus of this Proseminar. Functional pearls are elegant, instructive examples of functional programming. They are supposed to be fun, and they teach important programming techniques and fundamental design principles. This pertains, among others, to
- elegance in implementing algorithms,
- domain-specifc elegance (e.g. in parsing or in visualization),
- derivation of efficient implementations from inefficient references.

The individual presentation topics will mainly be based on research articles published as "Functional Pearls" in the Journal of Functional Programming or in leading conferences in the area of programming languages. Many of those works make use of the programming language Haskell. We will therefore spend the first few meetings discussing the quirks and particularities of Haskell, and contrast them to OCaml.

Besides the technical focus of the seminar, the learning objectives encompass learning how to read and digest scientific papers, how to summarize them, how to present research results, and how to provide feedback to peers.

A link to the course page will be inserted here, swiftly.

Requirements: This Proseminar is primarily aimed at motivated students in the second semester who have just completed the Programming 1 lecture.

Places: 12

Playing Roles To Discover Deep Learning by Rebekka Burkholz

It's time to connect to your inner kid in this fun and engaging proseminar format (https://colinraffel.com/blog/role-playing-seminar.md.html): Several students read the same book chapter, but each student takes on a specific role, which defines the lens through which they contribute to the discussion. Students cycle through roles throughout the course.

Content:
Deep learning continues to impress us with breakthroughs across disciplines and is a major driving force behind a multitude of industry innovations like ChatGPT or AlphaFold. Most of its successes are achieved by increasingly large neural networks that are trained on massive data sets. We will discover the basic principles in the design of modern architectures and discuss open challenges. The basic of the course will be the following book:
https://udlbook.github.io/udlbook/

More information about the course organization can be found here:
https://cms.cispa.saarland/pro_dl_25/

Important Dates:
* Kick-off meeting in the second week of the semester (April 22, 2024).
* The presentations will be organized as a bi-weekly meeting during the semester. We usually meet at 16:15 in E9 1 (CISPA main building) in Room 0.07. Participation is mandatory and absence will require additional course work in form of a report.

Requirements: Basic knowledge about machine learning

Places: 12

Reproducible methods in metagenomics by Johanna Schmitz, Jens Zentgraf and Sven Rahmann

In this seminar, we discuss recently published papers that introduced novel methods for metagenomic data analysis, mainly focusing on efficient algorithms and data structures for sequence data.
Starting with the original paper, participants shall explain the underlying method with all necessary background and apply the tool to check the reproducibility of the results in the paper.
To pass the seminar both a presentation (40 min for seminars and 30 min for pro-seminars) and a written report are required.

A kick-off meeting to discuss the organization and possible papers will be held early in the semester. Participation in this kick-off meeting is only possible if you have been assigned to this seminar by the seminar system. You will then receive an email with the exact date and time. To participate in the seminar, participation in the kick-off meeting is mandatory.

Possible topics include:

- data processing (quality control, contamination removal etc.)
- taxonomic classification
- (meta)genome assembly
- metagenomic phylogeny

Requirements: Basic knowledge about algorithms and data structures, e.g., Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures, Bioinformatik I, or Algorithms for Sequence Analysis

Places: 15

Secure Messaging by Aurora Naska, Cas Cremers

Millions of users now enjoy the benefits of modern secure messaging apps. In recent years, these platforms have introduced much stronger security features than ever before, leveraging technologies like the Signal protocol library (used by WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook’s secret conversations) and other advanced solutions.

This seminar will explore the theoretical foundations behind the design of these protocols, drawing from a selection of relevant research papers in this active and rapidly evolving field. Topics will include the novel security properties of these protocols, the subtle edge cases and security challenges in group messaging, and recent studies suggesting that the actual security achieved may be less than anticipated.

While most of the papers are technical and feature security models and proofs, understanding the proofs will not be required for the presentations. During the proseminar, our primary focus will be on presenting and discussing scientific work. Students will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, ask questions, and receive feedback from their peers and instructors.

A background in cryptography or protocol analysis can be helpful but is not essential.

Requirements: Preferably students should have completed the core Security, Cybersecurity I or II lectures.

Places: 10

Theory on Consensus by Christoph Lenzen

We will study a selection of key results on the fundamental consensus problem. In consensus, each of n parties receives an input, and the goal is to compute an output that (i) is the same for each party and (ii) satisfies a validity constraint (the most basic one would be: if all honest parties have the same input, this must be the output). The challenge is the an unknown subset of the parties may be faulty, to the point of maliciously trying to prevent consensus.

In this proseminar, you will be assigned a groundbreaking result to present to the other participants. The quality of your presentation matters most (75%), but you will also be expected to follow your fellow students' presentations and participate in the discussion (25%). There will be a test run of your presentation with me, to help you prepare the best presentation possible. Presentations should be 40-45 minutes, with a hard cap of 60 minutes. Note that this extra time is there to account for questions during the talk, not as slack for the presentation time! This is followed by questions from the audience.

Requirements: There are no specific requirements. However, be aware that this course will put significant focus on proofs, so I recommend to pick it only if you are inclined towards and proficient in mathematical reasoning.

Places: 12

Virtual Reality - Grundlagen und Stand der Forschung by Dr. André Zenner, Felix Kosmalla, Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger

In diesem Proseminar werden die theoretischen Grundlagen von virtueller Realität (VR), der aktuelle Stand der Forschung, sowie Kompetenzen zum wissenschaftlichen Denken und Präsentieren vermittelt. Das Proseminar basiert dabei auf dem Buch „The VR Book“ von Jason Jerald.

Nähere Infos hier:
https://umtl.cs.uni-saarland.de/teaching/summer-2025/proseminar-virtual-reality-grundlagen-und-stand-der-forschung.html

Places: 12