relAI Fellow Claudia Eckert Elected President of acatech

Fellow

👏 Congratulations!

On 1 July 2025, relAI fellow Claudia Eckert will assume the office of Scientific President of acatech - National Academy of Science and Engineering. She was unanimously elected by the acatech Executive Board.

acatech, founded in 2002 and established as the German Academy of Science and Engineering in 2008, represents the interests of German technical sciences independently, in self-determination and guided by the common good, at home and abroad. acatech is organized as a working academy that advises politicians and the public on forward-looking issues concerning the technical sciences and technology politics.

This is a significant recognition of Professor Eckert's leadership and expertise in the field.

For more information, please see the following links:

We are proud to announce that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an Advanced Grant to relAI Fellow Albrecht Schmidt for the project titled “AI Twins of Human Experience: Towards Personal Generative AI Systems for Amplifying Human Cognition.”

ERC Advanced Grants are highly prestigious, providing support to established and leading principal investigators who are pursuing groundbreaking and high-risk projects. This newly funded project aims to establish a scientific foundation for creating AI twins of human experiences. The goal is to store and process these experiences in a way that seamlessly enhances human cognitive and creative abilities. This initiative has the potential to transform the use of personal data, fostering cognitive augmentation and social connectivity through AI.

Find more information about this exciting project via the links below:

https://www.lmu.de/en/newsroom/news-overview/news/two-erc-advanced-grants-for-lmu-researchers-2.html

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/advanced-grants-2024-examples-projects#AItwin

🥂Congratulations!

relAI Fellow Björn Ommer has been awarded the 2024 Eduard Rhein Award Technology Prize. The award ceremony took place on 24 May 2025 at the Flugwerft Schleißheim.

The Eduard Rhein Foundation has honoured Björn Ommer and his team, a group of pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. Through open and efficient model architectures, the group has democratized access to generative AI. Their approach demonstrates the potential of generative AI not only for images, but also for other modalities such as audio and text, thus laying the foundation for a wide range of applications – from media production, where realistic or creative content is created for presentations, to prototyping in automotive design, to synthetic data to support diagnostics in medical research.

Follow this link to read the complete article.

relAI warmly welcomes TUM Professor Alexander König to our school. Prof. König is the Interim Head of the Chair of Robotics and System Intelligence and the Scientific Lead of Project Geriatronics at the Technical University of Munich.

His work sits at the intersection of medicine & healthcare and robotics & interacting systems, directly addressing the central themes of our program: Safety, Security, Privacy, and Responsibility. He follows two main research directions: i. Translating AI-controlled robotic technology from laboratory to patient, to investigate the real-world effects of AI and robotics on healthcare and caregiving. ii. Using AI and robotics to understand how aging affects cognitive abilities and motor control in the elderly, with the aim of optimizing quality of life through technology.

He will contribute to relAI through lectures and workshops on medical technology and robotics, teaching young scientists the path toward real-world application of their ideas with patients. Additionally, his insights on conducting user studies, navigating CE certification processes, and developing commercialization strategies through startups will further enrich research at relAI.

The Roland Berger Foundation (RBS) and TUM have begun a collaboration to promote the AI skills of socially disadvantaged children and young people. RBS works with 70 partner schools throughout Germany to provide scholarships to talented primary school pupils from the second grade onwards from socially disadvantaged families.

relAI Fellow Enkeledja Kasneci is the scientific director of the project. The scholarship holders learn how to use AI responsibly and reflectively. AI tools are also being developed to better support children and young people with difficult starting conditions

For more information, please visit the websites of Roland Berger Foundation and TUM.

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:

relAI warmly welcomes LMU Professor David Rügamer to our school. David heads the Data Science Group at LMU, and he is also a Principal Investigator at the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML).

Prof. Rügamer works on fundamental topics within the relAI research area Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations applied to neural networks, such as symmetries, sparsity, and uncertainty quantification in deep neural networks. Additionally, his work is also relevant to the Algorithmic Decision-Making relAI research topic. relAI will benefit from his research experience and, furthermore, from his contributions to our Curriculum, including lectures.. 

In this interview, relAI Fellow Daniel Rückert, recently awarded Germany’s highest research distinction, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, shares his insights on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in medicine.

Prof. Rückert discusses the significant potential of AI in early disease diagnosis, prevention, and personalized treatment, and explains his contributions to AI-assisted analysis of X-ray and MRI images, focusing on the detailed detection of abnormalities and the quick reconstruction of high-quality images. Notably, he emphasizes that reliability and explainability are essential aspects of AI systems in medicine and one of his research topics at relAI.

Follow this link to read the complete interview.

relAI warmly welcomes TUM Professors Lorenzo Masia and Bene Wiestler to our school. With the addition of these two excellent fellows, relAI will enhance its research areas “Robotics & Interacting Systems” and “Medicine & Healthcare”. 

Lorenzo Masia is a professor of “Intelligent BioRobotic Systems” and serves as the Deputy Director of the Munich Institute for Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at TUM. His research focuses on Rehabilitation Robotics and ExoSuits. His work involves developing reliable AI systems for human augmentation and assistance in medical contexts, which aligns perfectly with the mission of relA. 

Bene Wiestler is a professor of “AI for Image-Guided Diagnosis and Therapy” at the TUM School of Medicine and Health. His interdisciplinary approach merges medicine with machine learning, focusing on the research and application of advanced artificial intelligence models to tackle important clinical challenges. A key aspect of his work relevant to relAI is the development of safe and reliable AI models for medical applications. 

We are proud to announce that relAI Fellow Prof. Solveig Vieluf won the 2024 Young Investigator Award of the American Epilepsy Society (AES). Her abstract, titled “Seizure Monitoring with Combined Diary and Wearable Data - a Multicenter, Longitudinal, Observational Study”, was selected from over 1,500 submissions for this honor.  This award recognizes 20 young investigators conducting basic, translational, or clinical epilepsy research.

She presented her work at the AES Annual Meeting in early December 2024.

Congratulations!