If humanoid robots are to look like a human in the future and also understand what they see like humans do, this is infinitely complex: In the real world, everything is fluid and endlessly variable. Jan Eric Lenssen wants to teach machines to see, to give them a visual understanding modeled on that of humans.
On June 22, Science Minister Jakob von Weizsäcker Lenssen appointed Lenssen as Professor of Computer Science at the University of Saarland. The computer scientist, who is currently conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science on the Saarbrücken campus, will strengthen the Saarland Informatics Campus.
The variability of the real world poses challenges for artificial intelligence. Texts are particularly well suited for today's AI methods: they handle clear, so-called "discrete" data well—separate values that are countable and cannot grow continuously—as well as symbolic information. However, in the real world, much gets out of their control. Here, many pieces of information exist in continuous form: within a certain range, values are constantly changing, such as sensor data or movement patterns of objects and people.
In his research, Jan Eric Lenssen focuses on the question of how artificial intelligence can utilize and generate data that is given in so-called continuous representations, such as those found in video, time series, or three-dimensional sensor data. The computer scientist develops methods of visual artificial intelligence that enable neural networks to process, contemplate, model, and generate such complex structures – a task that is relevant, among other things, for robotics, physical and generative artificial intelligence, and image processing.
Jan Eric Lenssen became known, among other things, through PyTorch Geometric (PyG), a software library for graph-based neural networks that he co-developed during his PhD at TU Dortmund. PyG is now the most widely used library of its kind worldwide and forms the technical foundation for numerous research projects and practical applications. The start-up kumo.ai in Mountain View, California, which specializes in machine learning for relational databases and whose founding team included Lenssen, also built on PyG.
At Saarland University, Lenssen brings his expertise in Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence and aims to further expand his internationally successful research profile at the Saarland Informatics Campus. Through the joint research center of the Max Planck Institute and Google, as well as a long-standing cooperation program with Intel and Saarland, his work is closely linked to the international research landscape and industry.
Jan Eric Lenssen has been awarded multiple times for his research, including the DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2025 and an Emmy-Noether scholarship with funding amounting to approximately 1.9 million euros. His scientific work has also received high-level awards at leading conferences in computer vision and machine learning, including a Best Paper Award at ECCV 2022 and a Best Paper nomination at CVPR 2020. For his dissertation, he was honored with the ECVA PhD Award and the Dissertation Prize of TU Dortmund.
Short Biography
Jan Eric Lenssen studied computer science at TU Dortmund from 2009 to 2015, where he graduated with honors. He then completed his doctoral degree there in 2022 with the highest distinction, "summa cum laude." He undertook research stays at Meta Reality Labs (USA), the AI company nnaisense (Switzerland), and from 2021 was part of the founding team of the start-up kumo.ai. Afterwards, he conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow 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 a professor of computer science at Saarland University and an associated member of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
