Research news

On 16 and 17 January, a symposium at the Medical Campus in Homburg will be exploring how AI-based technologies are reshaping healthcare. The symposium ‘Artificial Intelligence in Medicine’ is hosted by the Health.AI network, Saarland University, Saarland University Medical Center and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). It is aimed at clinicians, healthcare professionals, and researchers, as well as anyone with an interest in the topic. [...]

A team of researchers from Saarbrücken and Leipzig has examined around 1,700 languages to identify structures that might occur universally. Of 191 grammatical patterns – known as linguistic universals – one third were found to be present in the languages studied. The team, led by Annemarie Verkerk of Saarland University and Russell Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has published its findings in Nature Human Behaviour. [...]

Researchers from Saarland University and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have, for the first time, shown that the reactions of humans and large language models (LLMs) to complex or misleading program code significantly align, by comparing brain activity of study participants with model uncertainty. Building on this, the team developed a data-driven method to automatically detect such confusing areas in code — a promising step toward better AI assistants for software development. [...]

With some 5,000 grades of steel available today, the steel manufacturing process hinges on fine nuances. To create new properties or to ensure consistent material quality, steels are analysed using a range of imaging techniques. Over many years, Professor Frank Mücklich and his research team have built extensive expertise in this field. Using their data from microscopy-based analyses, they have trained an AI to detect the smallest of changes in steel. [...]

On 27 and 28 November, experts from Italy, France, Sweden, Great Britain and Germany will meet at the Saarbrücken campus for a conference to discuss the status and prospects of digital historical word research. The topic is a central focus of research and of the teaching curriculum at Saarland University’s Chair of Romance Philology. [...]

Human languages are complex, rich and varied. From an information-theoretic perspective, however, they could convey the same information in a much more compact form. So why don't we speak 'digitally', encoding information in strings of ones and zeros like a computer? Michael Hahn, a linguist from Saarbrücken, has explored this question together with a research colleague from the US. They have developed a model that explains why we speak the way we do. [...]

For the past eight years, medical researchers at RWTH Aachen University, Saarland University and their respective university hospitals have been investigating the connection between kidney disease and cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular conditions often develop as a consequence of kidney disease, which means that the risk of dying from a cardiovascular illness is significantly higher among kidney patients than among people with healthy kidneys. [...]

AI assistants have rapidly become part of everyday life – whether through our interactions with large language models like ChatGPT or in medical applications that help interpret complex datasets. Yet, despite their widespread use, AI systems still make surprisingly simple mistakes that persist even after extensive training. They also lack the ability to think logically or to truly 'understand' nested input. For Michael Hahn the problem lies in the architecture itself. [...]

Ob ein Knochenbruch heilt, lässt sich mit handelsüblichen Messgeräten schnell und einfach überwachen – mit Licht statt schädlicher Röntgenstrahlung. Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Unfallchirurgie (DGU) zeichnete Professorin Bergita Ganse und ihre Doktoranden Oana Maria Scholz und Cedric Nowicki für diese neue Methode auf dem Deutschen Kongress für Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgie mit dem Innovationspreis aus. [...]

Outstanding research performance in academia is often measured by how frequently a scholar’s work is cited by others. Each year, the ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ list recognizes leading experts in specific fields whose publications are among the most frequently cited worldwide. This year, three researchers from Saarland University have once again earned a place on the prestigious list, reflecting their exceptional academic reputation. [...]