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Lenssen, who is currently a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics on the Saarbrücken campus, will further strengthen the Saarland Informatics Campus.
The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.
The ever-changing nature of the real world poses a challenge for artificial intelligence. Today’s AI systems are particularly well suited to text: they cope well with unambiguous, so-called ‘discrete’ data – that is, separate values that are countable and cannot grow continuously – as well as with symbolic information. In the real world, however, many things get out of their control. Here, much of the information is in continuous form: within a certain range, the values change constantly, such as sensor data or the movements of objects and people.
In his research, Jan Eric Lenssen explores how artificial intelligence can utilise and generate data that is present in so-called continuous representations – such as video, time series or three-dimensional sensor data. The Computer Science researcher develops methods of visual artificial intelligence that enable neural networks to process, analyse, model and generate such complex structures – a task that is significant for fields including robotics, physical and generative artificial intelligence, and image processing.
Jan Eric Lenssen became known, amongst other things, for PyTorch Geometric (PyG), a software library for graph-based neural networks, which he co-developed during his PhD at TU Dortmund University. PyG is now the world’s most widely used library of its kind and forms the technical basis for numerous research projects and practical applications. The start-up kumo.ai, based in Mountain View, California, which specialises in machine learning for relational databases and of which Lenssen was a founding member, also built upon this library.
At Saarland University, Lenssen is contributing his expertise in computer vision and artificial intelligence and aims to further expand his internationally successful research profile at the Saarland Informatics Campus. Through the joint research centre of the Max Planck Institute and Google, as well as a long-standing cooperation programme with Intel and the Saarland, his work is closely integrated with the international research landscape and industry.
Jan Eric Lenssen has received numerous awards for his research, including the DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2025 and an Emmy Noether Fellowship worth around 1.9 million euros. His scientific work has also received high-profile accolades at leading conferences on computer vision and machine learning, including a Best Paper Award at ECCV 2022 and a Best Paper nomination at CVPR 2020. For his [doctoral] dissertation, he received the ECVA PhD Award and the TU Dortmund University Dissertation Prize.
Short biography
Jan Eric Lenssen studied Computer Science at TU Dortmund University from 2009 to 2015, where he graduated with distinction. He subsequently obtained his doctoral degree there in 2022 with the highest distinction, ‘summa cum laude’. He undertook research stays at Meta Reality Labs (USA) and the AI company nnaisense (Switzerland), and from 2021 onwards was part of the founding team of the start-up kumo.ai. He then conducted research as a postdoctoral researcher and later as a senior researcher and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. Since 2026, Jan Eric Lenssen has been Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University and an associate member of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
For enquiries, please contact:
Prof. Dr Jan Eric Lenssen, email: jlenssen@mpi-inf.mpg.de
Press photos available for download:
Press photos can be found on this news webpage: https://www.uni-saarland.de/universitaet/aktuell/news.html
You may use the press photos free of charge in connection with this press release and reporting on Saarland University, provided you credit the photographer.
