The Faculty of Computer Science is pleased to welcome Prof. Jakob Runge as Professor of Data Science at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence as of June 1.

Jakob Runge graduated with honors from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2010 with a diploma in physics on the topic of “Coupling in the Climate System” at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and received his doctorate in 2014 on the topic of “Detecting and Quantifying Causality from Time Series of Complex Systems”. For his pioneering contributions, Jakob Runge was awarded the Carl Ramsauer Prize of the Berlin Physical Society and received the Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Studying Complex Systems from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, which brought him to the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

Since fall 2017, Jakob Runge has been leading a research group on causal inference at the DLR Institute of Data Science in Jena - since 2021, he has also been a guest professor for climate informatics at Technische Universität Berlin. In 2020, he won an ERC Starting Grant with his interdisciplinary project CausalEarth. The ERC Starting Grant is one of ten high-ranking awards that Jakob Runge has received.

Professor Runge sees his research goals in the development of theory, methods and accessible tools for causal inference with a strong application focus. The implementation is supported by his widely used open-source software Tigramite and close collaboration with researchers and industry practitioners. 

“Causal Inference is a challenging research area of AI and applications in fields such as climate science will have a high impact both to advance science and to address topics of critical importance for the society.” says Jakob Runge. “With my new research group at TU Dresden I am excited to explore new scientific frontiers in both theoretical causal inference and its practical applications.”

The Faculty of Computer Science is delighted to have gained an outstanding scientist with a strong interdisciplinary profile and many application collaborations by appointing Prof. Runge to the Chair of Data Science, which is also one of the strategic professorships for ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig.