The summer semester 2026 edition of our Game Engineering course (GAE) has come to an end, and once again the students were in it with a lot of fun and motivation. The result: 14 playable games, all built in Godot and all playable directly in the browser.
This year marks ten years since our research group began collaborating with Deutsche Welle (DW). Yesterday, Kai Eckert visited DW in person to mark the occasion and to meet with both old and new members of this long-standing collaboration.
On June 15, 2026, Kai Eckert returns to the Zentrum für Lehre und Lernen (ZLL) at Mannheim Technical University with a follow-up talk in the lecture series on AI-based tools in teaching, three years after the first installment.
On June 10, 2026, Kai Eckert will give a talk at the Liselotte-Gymnasium Mannheim as part of their Medienabend (Media Evening) — an event organized for students, teachers, and parents interested in the role of digital media in young people’s lives.
On April 2nd, 2026, Florian Rupp gave an invited guest lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In his talk, “Procedural Content Generation meets Game Balancing”, he explored key foundations and recent advances in AI-driven procedural content generation and game balancing, …
The course “Immersive Worlds — VR and Stage” (Virtual Reality Project, VRP, Winter Term 2025/26), co-created by JAVASCRIPT PROTECTED and Prof. Dr. Kai Eckert, asked students to develop and prototype concepts for Extended Reality technologies. The approach combined two …
Computer Science student Kim Mennemann has successfully defended her master’s thesis, marking a significant step forward in making global biodiversity data more accessible and “computable.”
In the upcoming summer term, we will teach two elective courses: Knowledge Graphs (new!, Master/Bachelor) and Game Engineering (Bachelor, now with 3D!).
KGR is a Master’s course, but will be open for ambitious Bachelor students!
On January 31, 2026, TH Mannheim co-hosted the First LEGO® League Regional Contest together with John Deere . For TH Mannheim, this marked the 18th time the university has organized this inspiring robotics and research competition.
A total of 13 teams, made up of students aged 9 to 16 from schools …
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a new three-year funding phase for the FID Jüdische Studien, securing up to two million euros to further expand the central research information infrastructure for Jewish and Israel Studies.
On December 11th, 2025, Florian Rupp successfully defended his doctoral thesis “Combining Procedural Content Generation and Heuristic Simulations for Automated Game Balancing” at University of Mannheim at the chair of Artificial Intelligence with a magna cum laude. Congratulations …
Florian Rupp presented how algorithmic approaches can create dynamic and engaging game content at Stuttgart Media University’s Games Day 2025.
Frederic Gerdon will present our latest research on algorithmic refugee placement systems at the In_equality Conference 2026 in Konstanz (15-17 April). Our work examines a critical question at the intersection of artificial intelligence, migration policy, and social integration: How do AI-based …
At the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE) in Edmonton, Canada, Florian Rupp and Manuel Eberhardinger presented their paper on explainable board game agents at the EXAG Workshop, and Florian Rupp presented his doctoral work on …
In this paper, we use a simulation study to investigate potential consequences of algorithmic refugee placement in Germany.
Game designers have long recognized that visuals affect player experience. But how deeply do art and style shape perceptions of game balance and strength?
A new research study explores how machine learning can accelerate the design of transparent fiber‑reinforced polymer composites, a class of materials that combines high mechanical strength with optical transparency.
New research demonstrates efficient unified approach for document summarization and retrieval in large-scale systems
We present a novel approach using reinforcement learning to create balanced game levels for players with different abilities.
Novel architecture combines reinforcement learning with simulation to automatically balance competitive game levels
Human playtesting confirms that reinforcement learning improves perceived balance in game levels
New method enables procedural generation of graph-based game content using reinforcement learning
New research enables cross-lingual extreme summarization of scholarly documents in multiple languages
System demonstration presents innovative tool for exploring ACL papers with semantic features
Novel framework uses evolutionary algorithms to generate and balance complex graph-structured game economies
Research explores innovative applications of RDF-star for metadata modeling and data management
New expert-crafted dataset enables aspect-based summarization of scholarly publications with unprecedented quality
A Multi-Dimensional Study on using an LLM for Constructing Data Visualizations.
Our paper “ROUGE-K: Do Your Summaries Have Keywords?” got published at *SEM 2024, authored by Sotaro Takeshita, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, and Kai Eckert.
Novel swap-based representations enable robust automatic balancing of two-player game levels
Multi-author collaboration examines data science education across information schools
The project “Consequences of Artificial Intelligence for Urban Societies: Using Impact-Aware AI to Make Smart Cities Socially Equitable (CAIUS)" is exploring the benefits and risks of using AI systems in the context of smart cities. It is funded by the Volkswagen Foundatation and is conducted …
Our third semester information science students develped a barometer app within the lecture “Web Programming” by Prof. Eckert. It is publicly available and can be used to get a quick feedback to a question like “How are you today?”.
At Thursday, April 25th, 2019, we launch our new institute: The HdM Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence.
WISS Research Group will become part of this institute, Prof. Dr. Kai Eckert is one of the chairmen.
The opening takes place from 14:00 - 17:30 at Nobelstraße 8 - 70569 Stuttgart. …
On July 25th, there will be the 2017 Big Data and Data Science Day in the context of our Master program “Data Science and Business Analytics”.
With 25 students, we participate in the Code for Culture GameJam.
Prof. Dr. Kai Eckert has been appointed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to the Committee for Scientific Libraries and Information Systems (Ausschuss für Wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken und Informationssysteme, AWBI).
Prof. Dr. Kai Eckert received the IBM Faculty Award 2016 for innovative teaching concepts in the Data Science and Business Analytics Master program.
We are very happy that our project proposal for an expert information servide got accepted for funding by the German Science Foundation (DFG).
