Data Science Group

Course Offerings in the Winter Semester 2023/24 

Here is some important information about the lecture and practicals offered by our group this upcoming winter semester 2023/24:

  • Course "Natural Language Processing with Transformers (INLPT)":  This is a new course targeting master students who want to get an in-depth understanding of the inner working of transformer architectures, how transformers are used in various NLP tasks, such as question answering or text summarization, and who want to employ tools and frameworks to develop and deploy transformer-based applications.  More details about the new lectures  can be found here. Note that students who have already taken the course "Text Analysis (ITA)" in the winter semester 2020/21 are not eligible to take this class! ITA has been split up into a bachelor course (Data Science for Text Analytics, IDSTA) and this master level course offered. Please register for this new course via  Müsli. We use the forum in Müsli to let you know further details about the course, access to Moodle site for this course etc..

  • Practicals "Data and Text Analytics (beginners and advanced)": Information about both beginners and advanced practicals our group offers in the winter semester 2023/24 will be  presented in a single session online on October 18 at 2:15pm via Webex. Please subscribe to this session via Müsli. Through the forum in Müsli we will let you know about the link to the online session. In this session we then present the topics for practicals and how to apply for a practical. Please note that we typically get many more applications than practicals we offer. In the winter semester, we expect to offer about 6-8 topics and practicals, respectively. 

People from the Data Science research group will typically in their offices but can also be contacted via email. In some cases, we also do video chats to talk about thesis issues, practicals etc., so don't send us lengthy emails. The secretary can be reached via phone Tu-Th 8:30am until 3:30pm and is in her office Th 9-2pm.


Welcome to the Data Science Research Group at Heidelberg University. Our research is centered around the management, processing, and analysis of complex data, ranging from scientific data and large-scale text data to  evolving network data. Research topics include

  • Data Science

  • Natural language processing (NLP)

  • Information retrieval and semantic search  
  • Machine learning  and deep learning

  • Complex network analysis

  • Legal Tech

Details about current and past research projects can be found here. Many of the research projects are interdisciplinary, covering application areas such as health sciences, law, politics, economy, physics, and biology.


The group offers several classes, seminars, and practicals at the introductory and advanced level. Besides an introductory course to Database Systems and a course on Data Science for Text Analytics at the bachelor level, at the graduate level we offer courses on Complex Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing with Transformers. A complete list of current and past courses and seminars can be found here.


Students interested in joining the group for a bachelor or master thesis or some interesting research project (introductory or advanced practical) can find some more information here.


Important note for international students interested in an internship: The group does not take any more international students for an internship for the academic years 2023 and 2024. Emails asking for an internship for that time period are very likely to remain unanswered.