relAI Retreat 2024

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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. 

Among the highlights of the event were inspiring keynote presentations. These spanned all four research areas of our school: Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations, Medicine & Healthcare, Robotics & Interacting Systems and Algorithmic Decision-Making.

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.

Speedgeeking
Lightning talk
Lightning talk

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. 

Group discussion
Group discussion
Group discussion
Presentations of a group discussion
Presentations of a group discussion
Presentations of a group discussion

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. 

relAI Fellow Pramod Bhatotia wins the 2024 Rising Star in Dependability Award: 

 “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.” 

Pramod Bhatotia is a professor for Systems Research at TU Munich and fellow at relAI. He received the award at the 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, which took place last week in Brisbane, Australia.  

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”.  

More information: https://dsn2024uq.github.io/awards_rs.html 

Our congratulations! 

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

10:00Welcome 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
Keynote Talk
Prof. Björn Ommer - Head of Computer Vision & Learning Group, LMU
Coffee break and poster exhibition
Presentations by Students from the Zuse Schools
Lunch
14:00Panel Discussion
Reliability in times of generative AI
Prof. Dr. Björn Ommer, LMU
Dr. Ahmed Sayed – Head of EMEA Emerging Technologies, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Speidel – NCT Department of Translational Surgical Oncology, TU Dresden
Presentations by Students from the Zuse Schools
Coffee break and poster exhibition
17:00Industry Keynote
Dr. Ahmed Sayed - Head of EMEA Emerging Technologies, AWS
Closing Remarks

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!

For more information on the Munich AI Lectures, co-organized by relAI, visit https://munichlectures.ai/upcoming/.

Image Copyright (c): Thomas Abé/Studienstiftung

Congratulations to relAI student Maria Matveev! 

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. 

Learn more about Marias volunteer work in the video portrait (in German): https://youtu.be/EUZdm--sqmc?feature=shared 

We are delighted to welcome four exceptional fellows to relAI: Nassir Navab, Solveig Vieluf, Tobias Lasser and Jochen Kuhn.  

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! 

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!

For more information on the Munich AI Lectures, co-organized by relAI, visit https://munichlectures.ai/upcoming/.

We are proud to announce that the German Radiological Society (Deutsche Röntgengesellschaft) has awarded the Alfred Breit Prize 2024 to our relAI fellow Prof. Julia Schnabel. The prize honors outstanding work and developments in the field of radiological research that have significantly contributed to progress in cancer therapy.

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.

Congratulations!

Save the date for the next Women in AI & Robotics community meetup co-organized by relAI!

On May 14th, our co-director Gitta Kutyniok will talk about “Reliable AI: From Mathematical Foundations to Neuromorphic Computing”.  The second presentation of the event will be held by Elke Wolf, Professor from Hochschule München University of Applied Sciences, on “Professor at a University of Applied Sciences – an attractive option for empowered women”.

See you there! Admission is free, but signing up required.

Are you interested in frontier AI systems, their astonishing capabilities and risks for humanity? Then join us for a thought-provoking deep dive and exclusive OpenAI Live Q&A on AI safety. 

  • Date: Wednesday, May 8th, 2024 | 19:00 – 20:30 
  • Location: Room B006, Department of Mathematics (Theresienstr. 39) or online 
  • Language: English 

Agenda: 

  • 19:00 – 19:05: Doors open 
  • 19:05 – 19:30: Introduction to AI Safety 
  • 19:30 – 20:15: Presentation & Live Q&A with OpenAI researcher Jan H. Kirchner, co-author of weak-to-strong generalization paper 
  • 20:15 – 20:30: Closing talk – What can we do? 
  • 20:30 – onward: Optional socializing and small group discussions with free drinks and snacks. 

Please register on the following webpage and prepare your questions!