Julian Höfer Earns His Ph.D. with Honors (“summa cum laude”) at KIT

The ITIV team extends its warmest congratulations to Julian Höfer on the successful completion of his doctorate. The scientist in Prof. Jürgen Becker’s research group completed his dissertation with the highest academic distinction, summa cum laude.

His dissertation, titled “Dependable Embedded Compute Platforms for Safety-Critical AI Systems,” addresses the reliability and safety of AI-based systems in safety-critical applications. The co-advisor for the dissertation was Prof. Dr.-Ing. Guillermo Payá Vayá from the Technical University of Braunschweig.

Julian Höfer’s research builds on his long-standing areas of focus at ITIV. These include the verification of AI methods and AI accelerators in safety-critical environments, energy-efficient hardware accelerators for machine learning, and hardware-software co-design for embedded AI systems. The target is to reliably and securely deploy high-performance AI methods in applications such as autonomous driving and other safety-critical divisions.

Summary of the Dissertation

The use of AI applications in safety-critical environments is becoming increasingly attractive as their performance improves. However, given the steadily increasing computational complexity of AI models, these must be deployed on embedded high-performance platforms with dedicated, highly optimized accelerators. The dissertation therefore addresses the risk analysis of such hardware-software AI systems and proposes new, AI-specific measures to safeguard against random hardware failures.

With his research findings, Julian makes an important contribution to the development of trustworthy AI systems and to the secure integration of modern AI methods into future embedded applications.

The ITIV extends its heartfelt congratulations on the doctorate awarded summa cum laude and wishes him every success in his future academic and professional endeavors.