Chair of Data Science at AIMS Retreat 2026
21 Juli 2026
From 15 to 17 July 2026, the Artificial Intelligence Meets Security (AIMS) Annual Retreat took place at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The event brought together researchers from defence-oriented universities and representatives of security authorities. Its main focus was interdisciplinary exchange on artificial intelligence and its relevance to current and future security challenges. The programme included expert talks on topics such as AI-supported threat intelligence, remote sensing, and the transfer of academic research into practical applications. These were complemented by an interactive wargaming demonstration, discussion sessions on military decision support, defence innovation and cognitive warfare, as well as poster sessions. The poster sessions gave early-career researchers in particular the opportunity to present their work and discuss it with experts from academia and practice.
The Chair of Data Science was represented by Hendrik Bothe. During one of the poster sessions, he presented the poster “Robust Obfuscation to Protect Sensitive Image Data”, developed jointly with Yeong Su Lee and Michaela Geierhos.
The presented work addresses the question of how profile images can remain useful for data-driven analyses without revealing the identities of the individuals depicted. To achieve this, different AI-based methods are used to extract relevant visual and demographic attributes from an original image and convert them into a structured textual description. Based on this description, a new synthetic profile image is generated. The aim is to remove identity-specific biometric features while preserving characteristics that remain relevant for subsequent scientific analyses.
As with the 2024 retreat, the event offered numerous opportunities for constructive discussions, professional feedback and networking across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The exchange between AI researchers and security experts once again highlighted the importance of addressing the opportunities, limitations and societal implications of emerging technologies at an early stage.
Sources: Hendrik Bothe (RI CODE)
