We are excited to announce the release of the relAI Blog. The blog is the relAI students' platform for sharing cutting-edge research and developments from our school, highlighting the significant strides relAI is making toward making AI systems safer, more trustworthy, and privacy-preserving.
The blog posts, authored by the students, will cover a diverse range of topics. From introductory discussions on relAI research to the latest project outputs, and even reports on interesting aspects of relAI life. The Blog Editorial Team, composed of relAI students, plays a crucial role in the editorial revision and publication.
The blog starts out with two posts, a welcome from the Editorial Team and an interesting introduction to uncertainty quantification from relAI PhD student and member of the Editorial Team, Lisa Wimmer.
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Mark your calendars for these interesting talks coming up in the next weeks!
The next talk, by Daniela Rus, is on July 15th, at 5pm at Lichtenbergstraße 2a, 85748 Garching, Auditorium (Ground floor) of Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), TUM and via zoom. She is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.
On Wednesday July 17th, Alexei A. Efros of University of California, Berkeley will discuss whether “We are (still?) not giving data enough credit”. The lecture takes place in cooperation with the ELLIS-Workshop on "Open Problems in Computer Vision & Generative Modelling" on the same day.
Sebastian Scherer, an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) will present his approaches, progress, and results on multi-modal sensing on Monday, July 22nd, at TUM Garching Campus, FMI Building, Boltzmannstr. 3, Hörsaal 2 (00.04.011).
relAI is a co-organiser of the Munich AI lectures. Find more info on these other upcoming events on the Munich AI lectures home page.
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We are thrilled to share the outcome of the recent (03 - 05.07) relAI retreat, which brought together more than 50 fellows and students in Miesbach. Over the course of three days, participants engaged in intriguing discussions, insightful keynotes, and a variety of activities focused on the various aspects of reliability in AI.
Mathias Drton “Causal Discovery and Inference” Solveig Vieluf “Insights into the Research of the AI-based Telemonitoring Working Group” Matthias Althoff “Provably Safe Reinforcement Learning through Online Verification” Stefan Feuerriegel “Causal ML for Predicting Treatment Outcomes”
Students got to know each other better during the Speedgeeking and Lightning Talks sessions. The first one consisted of five minutes one to one discussions on questions relevant to relAI students. The Lightning Talks, one minute presentations of each student´s research topic, allowed for a fast though comprenhesive view of the research carried out throughout relAI.
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A part of the retreat followed an unconference format, fostering engaging group discussions on various challenges of reliability of AI. These ranged from the lack of sufficiently large datasets in medicine and healthcare, to explainability of foundation models and the societal impacts of large language models. Some of the discussions focused on improving the relAI program, such as our relAI seminar, relAI blog and relAI safety hackathon.
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Towards the end of the retreat, relAI Fellows celebrated the third relAI Fellows assembly, a successful meeting that tackled organizational and research issues of the school.
As relAI integrates into the Universities of Excellence, TUM and LMU, bringing together members who work and study across various parts of Munich, events like this retreat are invaluable. They strengthen the "relAI family," fostering collaboration, scientific exchange and community spirit. We are already looking forward to the next retreat!
Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to making this event a great success.
“For his impressive track-record and contributions in the field of dependable systems, including multiple publications in highly regarded venues, and influence on practical dependable systems.”
The award aims to recognize a junior researcher, “who demonstrates outstanding potential for creative ideas and innovative research in the field of dependable and resilient computer systems and networks”.
We are happy to announce that on October 29th, the three DAAD Zuse Schools of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, ELIZA (Darmstadt), SECAI (Dresden) und relAI (Munich), will celebrate the second joint Meeting in Munich.
The event, co-organized by DAAD and relAI, will be honoured with the presence of representatives from the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts (StMWK), Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), TUM and LMU presidents, and DAAD, who will introduce the meeting with opening speeches. The program will be followed by talks from research fellows, students, and industry partners of the Zuse Schools and rounded by a podium discussion.
Preliminary Agenda
10:00
Welcome Adresses
Dr. Rolf-Dieter Jungk - Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts (StMWK) Dr. Kai Sicks - DAAD Secretary General MinR’in Dr. Lisette Andreae – Head of Unit European Higher Education Area, Internationalization, BMBF Prof. Dr. Thomas Hofmann - President, TUM Prof. Dr. Francesca Biagini - Vice President for International Affairs and Diversity, LMU
KeynoteTalk Prof. Björn Ommer - Head of Computer Vision & Learning Group, LMU
Presentations by Students from the Zuse Schools
14:00
Panel Discussion
Presentations by Students from the Zuse Schools
17:00
Industry Keynote Dr. Ahmed Sayed - Head of EMEA Emerging Technologies, AWS
Final Remarks
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The next Munich AI Lecture will take place on Tuesday, June 25th at 5pm at Arcisstr. 21, Room 0790 and via zoom.
Ivan Laptev, visiting professor at MBZUAI and a senior researcher on leave from Inria Paris, will talk about "From Video Understanding to Embodied Agents". Mark your calendars and join us there!
The German National Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung) has awarded Maria the Civic Engagement Award 2024 for her exceptional volunteering work with Lern-Fair. Maria co-founded and chairs Lern-Fair e.V., a non-profit organization dedicated to providing free educational opportunities for underprivileged pupils. Since the start of the online platform in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, more than 15.000 pupils were supported by free tutoring or group courses.
Maria is a relAI PhD student at the chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at LMU and the Munich Center for Machine Learning. Her PhD research, advised by the relAI director Gitta Kutyniok, focuses on the mathematical description and understanding of training dynamics related to generalization, a crucial factor for ensuring the reliability of neural networks.
Each of them brings their own expertise and insights that will further enrich our research agenda, educational offers, and scientific community. They are dedicated to making significant contributions to the advancement of reliable AI, particularly in Medicine & Healthcare and AI in Education areas.
Nassir Navab is a full professor and director of the Laboratories for Computer Aided Medical Procedures at TUM and adjunct professor at John Hopkins University. One focus of his research is AI assisted Surgery, where reliable methods are a key requirement for both clinicians and patients.
Solveig Vieluf is a professor of AI-based telemonitoring in the field of cardiology at LMU. Previously, she has also worked on epilepsy and aging research. She uses methods from explainability to explore influence factors on model performance.
The research of Tobias Lasser is focused on computational imaging and inverse problems in medicine and healthcare. In his work on clinical decision support using AI, he works on prioritization of critical cases for treatment.
Jochen Kuhn works on the intersection of AI and education, in particular on the use of these future technologies to foster learning and teaching in STEM disciplines. He is a professor of Physics education at LMU. Reliability is important in his research, particularly the role of bias and inaccurate information from AI chatbots on learning and teaching.
Join us in welcoming these four to the relAI community!
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The next Munich AI Lecture will take place on Tuesday, June 18th at 5 pm at Arcisstr. 21, Room 2750 (Karl Max von Bauernfeind auditorium) and via zoom.
This edition features Ludovic Righetti (New York University), who will talk about "Learning complex robotic behaviors with optimal control". Mark your calendars and join us there!
Julia Schnabel is Professor for Computational Imaging and AI in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich TUM (Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professorship), and Director at the Institute for Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging at Helmholtz Munich (Helmholtz Distinguished Professorship). Since 2015, she has also been Professor of Computational Imaging at King's College London.
Prof. Schnabel works in the field of medical image processing and machine learning. Her research focuses on the areas of intelligent imaging up to clinical evaluation, including complex motion modeling, image reconstruction, quality assurance, segmentation, and classification applied to multimodal, quantitative, and dynamic imaging.
