DAAD Interview with relAI director Gitta Kutyniok

Director

Europe faces challenges in the competitive field of artificial intelligence (AI). relAI director Gitta Kutyniok shares her insights on the current landscape of AI in Europe and proposes future strategies for developing trustworthy and secure AI technologies:

  • Europe should focus on specialised, efficient, and transparent AI.
  • We should place the emphasis on smart AI research: high-quality training data, efficient models, specialised software and hardware, and open-source approaches.
  • We should further build on another of our advantages: our pool of excellent researchers.
  • AI regulation assures trustworthiness, and Europe could be a role model in this area.
  • An international data privacy agreement for AI can address the data security concerns of AI models.
  • AI models running locally allow personalised teaching and lower costs. This is an enormous opportunity for universities and research institutions because open-source models offer transparency and flexibility.

Read the complete Interview:  https://www.daad.de/de/der-daad/daad-journal/themen/2025/kuenstliche-intelligenz-europa-gitta-kutyniok-relai/

🥂Congratulations!

We are proud to announce that our relAI Director Gitta Kutyniok has been invited to become a member of the US National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI). NAAI is committed to advancing artificial intelligence by fostering collaboration among leading experts and promoting innovative research and development.

The election acknowledges Gitta Kutyniok's distinguished contributions to applied harmonic analysis, compressed sensing, and artificial intelligence. This honor recognizes her leadership as the Bavarian AI Chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), which has significantly advanced research and collaboration in these fields. Additionally, NAAI greatly appreciated her recognition as a SIAM Fellow in 2019 and an IEEE Fellow in 2024, which highlights her outstanding accomplishments and the high regard in which she is held by her peers. 

relAI is proud to support the opening ceremony of the project “Next Generation AI Computing (gAIn)"! This collaboration between LMU and TUM in Bavaria and TU Dresden in Saxony is financially supported by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts, as well as the Saxon State Ministry for Science, Culture, and Tourism. The goal of the project is to develop a comprehensive, mathematics-based concept for the next generation of "Green AI" systems. The focus will be on application-based AI hardware-software combinations aimed at maximizing energy efficiency, trustworthiness, and legal compliance.

The event will feature keynotes from Minister Blume (Bavaria) and Minister Gemkow (Saxony), and a scientific lecture by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard (UTN), as well as general information about the project.

For the Konrad Zuse Schools of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, the project presents a significant opportunity to collaborate, as relAI Director Gitta Kutyniok and Stefanie Speidel, deputy director of the Zuse School SECAI, are both Principal Investigators on the project.

 

The European legal initiative to regulate AI (Artificial Intelligence Act) poses a particular challenge to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups that want to benefit from artificial intelligence and pursue innovations. Bavarian AI Act Accelerator, a new project funded by the Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Digitales and coordinated by the appliedAI Institute for Europe gGmbH, is designed to support companies in fulfilling the new requirements and, therefore, lower barriers to the use of artificial intelligence.

Principal contributors of the project include relAI directors Prof. Dr.  Gitta Kutyniok and Prof. Dr. Stephan Günnemann,  relAI fellow Prof. Dr. Mark Zöller, as well as scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN), who provide the necessarily high degree of interdisciplinarity.

relAI director Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok leads the scientific part of the project. One of the main goals is to develop a system for automatic, and hence easy and fair, verification with the EU AI Act. This requires the following steps:
🔹Derive a profound legal understanding of the different terminologies.
🔹Develop a formalization/mathematization of the articles.
🔹 Build a system for automatic verification.

🛫 Our director, Gitta Kutyniok, gave a talk and joined the panel discussion at the Kick-Off event last week (photo) as the scientific lead of the project.   

Excerpts taken from:

After Stargate and DeepSeek, which technological developments will influence the future of the AI race? What implications does this hold for Germany and Europe? Have we constrained ourselves too soon with the AI Act? In an interview on the “Plattform Lernende Systeme” website, Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok, Director of relAI and member of the Platform, discusses the current dynamics and explains how mathematics can enhance the comprehensibility of AI results.

Watch the interview here.

The Saxon-Bavarian AI project GAIn – Next Generation AI Computing is a pilot project tackling new AI hardware and software concepts to reduce energy consumption and increase reliability for different applications such as surgical robotics. It builds on the foundation of the Cluster of Excellence CeTI, the 6G-life research hub, and the Konrad Zuse Schools of Excellence SECAI and relAI. The project aims to address key challenges in energy consumption, predictability, reliability, and legal implementation. A core objective is to significantly reduce the energy consumption of AI-based applications while enhancing their predictability and reliability for different applications such as surgical robotics.

The project has now been officially launched. Together with Frank Fitzek (TU Dresden), Gitta Kutyniok (LMU, relAI) and Holger Boche (TUM), Stefanie Speidel (TU Dresden, SECAI) hosted the kick-off meeting of the project.  The cooperation across federal states will strengthen Germany's technological sovereignty and contribute to the international leadership role of Saxony and Bavaria in central computing technologies.

Excerpts from the TUD press release AI project "GAIn" with TUD participation aims to propel Saxony and Bavaria to an international leadership role in computing technologies, of the National Center of Tumor Disease Dresden (NCT)  GAIn (2024 – 2027)  and of SECAI news https://secai.org/content/news/56

Please take a look at the excellent interview with the director of relA Prof. Günnemann at TUM. The interview, titled “The reliability of AI will play a decisive role in Germany”, emphasizes the transformative focus that our school's main topic plays in technology.

Congratulations to our relAI director Gitta Kutyniok!

The world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity IEEE has selected Gitta Kutyniok for the elevation to IEEE Fellow, the highest grade of membership in IEEE. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected for this member grade elevation each year.

The IEEE Fellow Committee recognized her achievements with the following statement: “for contributions to the mathematical theory of artificial intelligence in signal processing and communication”

Congratulations to the relAI PhD Student Lisa Wimmer, the relAI fellow Bernd Bischl, and the relAI director Stephan Günnemann on the best paper award of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD 2023).

ECML PKDD is Europe’s top machine learning and data mining conference, with over 20 years of successful events and conferences across the continent. The ECML PKDD 2023 was held in Turin, Italy from the 18th to the 22nd of September 2023.

List of authors and title of the awarded paper:Jonas Gregor Wiese, Lisa Wimmer, Theodore Papamarkou, Bernd Bischl, Stephan Günnemann, David Rügamer    
Towards Efficient MCMC Sampling in Bayesian Neural Networks by Exploiting Symmetry