International recognition for peer-review excellence goes to TU Dortmund University

When the global AI community evaluates new research contributions, the quality and fairness of the review process are essential. At the 2026 conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Prof. Alexander Marx was recognized for his contribution to this process as a member of the Program Committee.

Out of 26,421 Program Committee members worldwide, 42 researchers – representing 0.16 percent – received an Outstanding Program Committee Award. The distinction acknowledges reviewers who provided particularly thorough and constructive evaluations, engaged in scientific discussion, and contributed to balanced and well-founded decisions within the peer-review process.

Alexander Marx is Professor at TU Dortmund University, where he leads the Chair of Causality within the Department of Statistics and the Causality group at the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security (RC Trust). His research sits at the intersection of causality and machine learning. By studying how cause-and-effect relationships can be discovered and modeled from data, his team works to make AI systems more robust, reliable, and capable of generalizing beyond the conditions they were trained on.

AI systems are increasingly applied in areas such as healthcare, industry, public administration, and digital services. In these contexts, distinguishing between correlations and causal relationships is an important methodological challenge. The Chair of Causality, established in 2024 at TU Dortmund University within the Department of Statistics and affiliated with RC Trust, focuses on research in causal discovery, causal inference, representation learning, and information theory. The aim is to contribute to the development of AI systems that generalize more reliably across varying and previously unseen conditions.

The AAAI Award highlights the role of responsible scientific service within a rapidly evolving research field. Conferences such as AAAI depend on the careful work of reviewers to ensure methodological rigor and transparent decision-making. Through his involvement in this process, Alexander Marx contributed to maintaining these standards within the international AI community.

For TU Dortmund University, the Department of Statistics, and RC Trust, this recognition reflects the strength of interdisciplinary AI research in the Ruhr area. For students and early-career researchers, it demonstrates how scholarly rigor, community engagement, and methodological depth are integral parts of academic excellence. And for society at large, it is a reminder that trustworthy AI begins not only with algorithms, but with the people who evaluate, question, and refine them.

With this award, Alexander Marx joins a small group of researchers whose service helps shape the global AI landscape – quietly, rigorously, and with lasting impact.