Dear USTUTT IMPRS-IS Faculty, As you all know, the 2026 IMPRS-IS Interview Symposium will start next week and I hope that you all have interesting candidates to interview. Please remember that the strict (!) deadline to submit your evaluation results to the IMPRS-IS coordination office is 9:00 am on Monday, February 23. The Executive Board will meet on February 26 to decide which candidates to accept to the IMPRS-IS. I will be at that meeting, and I will see my role in helping you get the outcome you desire. To be able to do so you must inform me latest by 6:00 pm on Tuesday, February 24 about your hiring intentions. If I don't hear from you I won't be able to help getting your candidate(s) accepted. By that time (at the latest) you should also think about how to finance the candidate(s) whom you would like to make an offer. The default is that you provide the necessary funding yourself but with this email I would also like to inform you about possible co-funding options. If you intent to request co-funding, you should let me know together with your hiring intention(s). Possible co-funding ------------------- - 3 years × 1.0 FTE (full-time equivalent) E13 for all USTUTT IMPRS-IS early career faculty members (e.g., (tenure-track) junior professors, independent research group leaders who went through competitive peer-review (e.g. Emmy-Noether, IRIS), etc.). - 3 years × 0.5 FTE E13 for tenured faculty members (including W3), provided that available funds are not fully allocated to early career faculty already. General rules for co-funding ---------------------------- - Each USTUTT IMPRS‑IS faculty member can only have one co‑funding allocation at any point in time. - Financial support can only be used towards the personnel costs (salary) of a single (named) IMPRS-IS PhD student. - By accepting a co‑funding allocation, you formally commit to finance the candidate, if necessary, beyond the three‑year period until the PhD degree is completed. - Unused funding cannot be carried over to the next year. - Funding is provided only for the current hiring round, i.e. a confirmed but unused allocation can not be postponed to the next round. The faculty member has to submit a new co-funding request in the next round. - Should the co-funded doctoral candidate drop out of the IMPRS-IS PhD program prematurely, another current (already accepted at that point in time) IMPRS-IS doctoral candidate of the same faculty member can step in and be co-funded from the remaining funds, i.e. within the limits of the original allocation. Prioritisation of requests and further rules for tenured faculty ---------------------------------------------------------------- - Priority 1: Tenured faculty members without prior funding, whose prior funding ended a long time ago, or who did not use their full allocation (e.g. because their candidate dropped out prematurely and no other candidate could step in) - Priority 2: Co-supervision projects involving two IMPRS‑IS faculty members from two different institutions (USTUTT, UTÜB, MPI) or, with lower priority, two different institutes at USTUTT. Co-supervision has to be official, e.g. proven by both supervisors sharing the remaining costs for salary, travel, equipment etc. - Higher FTE shares (e.g., 75%) must be covered from the faculty member's own financial resources. - IMPRS‑IS doctoral candidates must be offered at least a 67% E13 position. I hope these rules are clear to everybody, including those of you who joined during the last year. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch. Good luck for your hiring efforts! Andreas -- Prof. Dr. Andreas Bulling Full Professor Collaborative Artificial Intelligence Deputy Spokesperson and Member of the Executive Board International Max-Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS) Founding Director Stuttgart ELLIS Unit ELLIS Fellow Member of the Scientific Directorate Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics Institute for Visualisation and Interactive Systems (VIS) University of Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 5a, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany Phone +49 711 685 60048 Fax +49 711 685 51082 Email: andreas.bulling@vis.uni-stuttgart.de URL: https://collaborative-ai.org/people/bulling/