News
ATHENE is expanding its expertise at the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence
Prof.Adi Akavia took up an ATHENE professorship in the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt, also becoming head of department at the Fraunhofer SIT. This appointment strengthens ATHENE's position as a leading research centre for applied cybersecurity in Germany.
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Marc-André Kaufhold is coordinating ATHENE project on AI against hate speech on the internet
Dr. Marc-André Kaufhold is a visiting professor of knowledge engineering in the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt, as well as being a researcher in the PEASEC (Science and Technology for Peace and Security) research group. Later this year, he will be launching a new project in the ATHENE research area, "Reliable and Verifiable Information through Secure Media (REVISE)". In this interview, he introduces himself and discusses his work on the ATHENE project, "Towards an Effective Multi-Label Classification and Model Auditing Ecosystem for Combatting Textual Online Hate Speech — CYNTRA".
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Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schneider is joining ATHENE's CRYPTO research area
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schneider, of the ENCRYPTO department at TU Darmstadt, researches cryptographic protocols for protecting sensitive data. His main areas of focus are Multi-Party Computation, Private Set Intersection sowie Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning und Federated Learning. He has been involved in ATHENE again since the beginning of 2026. In this interview, he discusses his ATHENE research and what he particularly appreciates about his work.
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ATHENE researchers have uncovered serious security vulnerabilities in children's smartwatches.
Smartwatches enable children to make calls and send text messages to their parents. Parents can also use the device to track their child's location. Designed for children aged 4–10, these smartwatches serve as an introduction to smartphones. ATHENE researchers from the Secure Mobile Networks (SEEMOO) department at TU Darmstadt, headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Hollick, have examined a children's smartwatch and found that even basic IT security mechanisms were not observed. Doctoral student Nils Rollshausen explains the details of the analysis in an interview.
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From our research: Greater fairness in facial recognition
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Naser Damer and his team at ATHENE are developing innovative methods for fair biometric systems. In this interview, he explains how continuous demographic labels instead of discrete categories reduce bias in facial recognition systems and what role this research plays in trustworthy AI applications.
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