History

The Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI INF) was established by founding director Kurt Mehlhorn in 1988 and began its work in 1990. It was the first institute of the Max Planck Society, Germany's premier research organization, to focus exclusively on computer science. In 1996 the Institute moved into its building on the campus of Saarland University.

After the Institute was founded, Kurt Mehlhorn headed the Algorithms and Complexity department until 2022, when he handed it over to the current director Danupon Nanongkai. Harald Ganzinger, who joined the institute shortly after it was founded, headed the Programming Logics department until his death in 2004. A third department, Computer Graphics, followed in 1999 under the direction of Hans-Peter Seidel. In 2001, Thomas Lengauer joined the institute and headed the Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics department until his retirement in 2018. In October 2003, the Databases and Information Systems department was founded under the direction of Gerhard Weikum, who headed it until his retirement in 2023. In 2010, the Computer Vision and Machine Learning department was added under the direction of Bernt Schiele. In 2018, the Department of Internet Architecture was founded under the leadership of Anja Feldmann. In 2021, the Department of Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence began its research under the leadership of Christian Theobalt. In addition to the above-mentioned departments, three independent research groups work at the institute: the Automation of Logic group was founded by Christoph Weidenbach in 2005. In 2020, the Network and Cloud Systems group, headed by Yiting Xia, began its work. Most recently, Vera Demberg founded the Multimodal Language Processing research group in 2024.

From 2003 to 2020 with the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication a cooperation between Max Planck Society and  Stanford University was established to support young computer scientists in their careers.

From 2007 to 2017, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics was one of the core partners in the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction, which was established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative.

In 2022 a long-term strategic research partnership between Google and MPI INF has been established with the Saarbrücken Research Center on Visual Computing, Interaction and Artificial Intelligence (VIA). The VIA-Center is headed by the founding director Christian Theobalt and Co-Director Bernt Schiele.

In 2024, a total of 140 scientists work at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, including 96 doctoral students and 44 postdoctoral researchers.