# Osman Mian

> Osman Ali Mian is an early-career AI researcher specializing in causal discovery and trustworthy machine learning. He completed his PhD magna cum laude at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Saarland University, Germany) and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) in Essen. He has published at top-tier venues including AAAI, ICML, AISTATS, and KDD, and won an Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2026 — marking him as a rising star in causal ML.

- **Role:** Postdoctoral Researcher at IKIM – Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (Ruhr University Bochum / UK Essen), Trustworthy Machine Learning group
- **Organizations:** IKIM – Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland University (Universität des Saarlandes), Amazon (former intern)
- **Education:** PhD in Computer Science – Magna Cum Laude, Saarland University (Universität des Saarlandes), Master of Science in Computer Science, Saarland University (Universität des Saarlandes)
- **Known for:** AAAI 2026 Outstanding Paper Award for 'Causal Structure Learning for Dynamical Systems with Theoretical Score Analysis' — one of only five papers selected at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference, PhD defended Magna Cum Laude (February 28, 2025) at Saarland University, Two oral presentations accepted at AAAI 2026 (highly competitive selection)

## Career timeline

- **~2017–2019** — Completed MSc at Saarland University; Master's thesis conducted at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- **2019** — Joined CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security as a PhD student in Prof. Jilles Vreeken's Exploratory Data Analysis group, Saarbrücken, Germany
- **2021** — Published first paper: 'Discovering Fully Oriented Causal Networks' at AAAI 2021 (co-authored with Alexander Marx and Jilles Vreeken)
- **2022** — Published at ICML 2022 ('Inferring Cause and Effect in the Presence of Heteroscedastic Noise') and KDD 2022 workshop on causal discovery
- **Dec 2022 – Apr 2023** — Applied Science Intern at Amazon, applying Causal Learning to Natural Language Understanding
- **2023** — Published two papers at AAAI 2023 and AISTATS 2023, including ORION algorithm for multi-environment causal discovery and privacy-preserving federated causal discovery
- **2024** — Published at KDD 2024 ('Learning Causal Networks from Episodic Data') and AAAI Bridge Program 2024
- **Feb 2025** — Successfully defended PhD thesis 'Practically Applicable Causal Discovery' at Saarland University with distinction (Magna Cum Laude)
- **Dec 2024** — Joined IKIM – Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (Essen, Germany) as Postdoctoral Researcher in Dr. Michael Kamp's Trustworthy Machine Learning group
- **Jan 2026** — Received Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2026 for 'Causal Structure Learning for Dynamical Systems with Theoretical Score Analysis' (one of five papers selected); also had two oral presentations at AAAI 2026

## Achievements

- AAAI 2026 Outstanding Paper Award for 'Causal Structure Learning for Dynamical Systems with Theoretical Score Analysis' — one of only five papers selected at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference
- PhD defended Magna Cum Laude (February 28, 2025) at Saarland University
- Two oral presentations accepted at AAAI 2026 (highly competitive selection)
- Published consistently at top-tier ML/AI venues (AAAI, ICML, AISTATS, KDD) across five consecutive years (2021–2026)
- Developed CaDyT algorithm for causal structure learning in dynamical systems, outperforming state-of-the-art on regularly and irregularly-sampled time-series data
- Developed ORION algorithm for information-theoretic causal discovery across multiple environments
- Contributed privacy-preserving federated causal discovery research ('Nothing but Regrets')
- Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge on GitHub

## Latest updates

- **2026-01** — Won AAAI 2026 Outstanding Paper Award for 'Causal Structure Learning for Dynamical Systems with Theoretical Score Analysis' (co-authored with Nicholas Tagliapietra, Katharina Ensinger, Christoph Zimmer)
- **2026-01** — Two papers accepted as oral presentations at AAAI 2026 — 'SEQRET: Mining Rule Sets from Event Sequences' and the award-winning dynamical systems paper
- **2026-early** — Paper on unified causal discovery and data imputation accepted at AISTATS 2026
- **2025-02** — Defended PhD thesis 'Practically Applicable Causal Discovery' magna cum laude at Saarland University
- **2024-12** — Joined IKIM – Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine in Essen as a Postdoctoral Researcher under Dr. Michael Kamp in the Trustworthy Machine Learning group

## Links

- Website: https://sites.google.com/view/mian/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osman-ali-mian-79476b41/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/osmanmian
- GitHub: https://github.com/osman-mian

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/osman
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-20