2nd DAAD Zuse School Meeting

Events

e.g. Welcome Week, Retreat, DAAD Inauguration,…

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
Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kramer – Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, TUM
Prof. Dr. Hans van Ess – Vice President for Research, LMU
Dr. Kai Sicks – DAAD Secretary General
MinR’in Dr. Lisette Andreae – Head of Unit European Higher Education Area, Internationalization, BMBF
MinDir Dr. Rolf-Dieter Jungk – Bavarian State Ministry for Science and the Arts (StMWK)
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/.

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/.

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! 

Last week, our relAI students presented their research to the relAI industry partners in a series of industry workshops. Four events took place, each centered around one of  the four relAI’s research areas: Mathematical & Algorithmic foundations, Algorithmic Decision-Making, Medicine & Healthcare and Robotics & Interacting Systems. 

We are thrilled that this event was so well received both by the students and the industry partners! Following short lightning talks, intriguing discussions around reliability of AI took place in smaller breakout groups.  

The industry workshops are part of relAI´s cross-sectional training and aim to facilitate the exchange of insights and expertise between academia and industry. The engagement from both our students and industry fellows emphasized the significance of bridging academic excellence with real-world applications, particularly when addressing the evolving challenges in AI reliability. 

We are thrilled to share the outcomes of our recent student-driven event organized by Maria Matveev and Julius Hege from the Chair of Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (LMU): the first relAI Safety hackathon held last weekend! This dynamic gathering brought together a mix of students and professionals interested in the field of AI Safety. 

Over the course of two intense days, participants delved into practical projects aimed at addressing various aspects of AI safety. Their projects ranged from adversarial prompting on a binary question data set, measuring the robustness of the responses, to a website to compare your own emotional intelligence and bias to large language models such as Llama and ChatGPT. The latter project is publicly available, and you can try it out here: mindmatch.streamlit.app  

The atmosphere at the hackathon was inspiring, with enthusiastic participants exchanging ideas, insights and experiences on how to enhance the reliability and safety of AI. The event provided a great opportunity for attendees not to only work on innovative projects, but also to engage in thought-provoking discussions surrounding the ethical implications and potential risks associated with AI. Looking forward to more engaging events! 

Social media links of the event: X & LinkedIn

Day 2 of the 2023 relAI retreat combined inspiring keynote talks by relAI fellows Sandra Hirche (“Learning Controls with Guarantees”) and Johannes Maly (“Implicit regularization of training algorithms and resource efficiency”) with more sessions of lightning talks and two rounds of group discussions, a new activity introduced for the first time during this year's retreat.

Keynote talk by Prof. Hirche
Prof. Maly´s keynote talk

The first group discussion session dealt with research topics suggested by fellows and students. The presentations of the discussions’ outcomes showed the intensity and depth with which these discussions had been conducted. The second round of discussions focused on relAI organizational topics such as the relAI Blog and Alumni and were very productive. They were presented on the last day of the retreat with amazing outcomes, including a newly founded student committee to coordinate the new relAI blog, and a student representative responsible for building a relAI alumni network. The election of new student representatives and IDP discussion sessions rounded off two very successful days.

First group discussions
First group discussions
Second group discussions
IDP discussion session
Lightning talk
Lightning talk

Although the weather was very much November-like, everyone enjoyed the talks, fruitful discussions and social activities in this great location. The preparations for the next retreat have already started; it will take place in summer 2024 and we’re looking forward to gathering the relAI family again.

From November 16th to November 18th, the relAI family gathered at the Yachthotel Chiemsee for its second retreat.

The retreat started on the 16th with a warm opening by our two directors, Stephan Günnemann and Gitta Kutyniok. Afterwards, the relAI fellow Debarghya Ghoshdastidar gave the first keynote talk about “Over-parameterization and Over-fitting: Myths, theory and tools” followed by a very lively discussion around this topic.

Keynote talk by Prof. Ghoshdartidar

Day One´s program concluded with a highlight of this year's retreat, a round of lightning talks, where each of our students introduced themselves and their research focus in one minute. Spread over the two days of the retreat, the one minute presentations together with the social interactions resulted in everyone having a very good idea about what interests all the other students have.

Lightning talks
Social Interactions

On the 11th and 12th of October, relAI welcomed the new cohort of relAI Master and Doctoral students. The event included informative sessions about relAI and networking activities. At the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI), TUM, the relAI directors and coordinators presented the relAI program to the new students. The first relAI cohort of students organised a lively interactive session (photo) to welcome and get to know the new students.