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.
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
On 14 September, the Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI, TUM) celebrated its official opening at the Science Congress Center in Garching. The event included inaugural words by the Bavarian State Minister for Science and the Arts, M. Blume, and the TUM President, Prof. Dr. T. Hofmann. Top-class scientific lectures from MDSI Members, presentations of outstanding MDSI projects, a panel discussion, and a poster session rounded the program.
The Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI (relAI), a joint project between TUM and LMU funded by DAAD, which had been initiated through an MDSI Focus Topic, was one of the projects highlighted at the opening. relAI Coordinator Dr. Andrea Schafferhans introduced relAI to the audience, giving an excellent overview of its educational and research programs as well as its people. relAI was also widely represented at the poster session by relAI Master students and PhD researchers from the TUM University, who discussed their research projects with the numerous guests of the event, among them, MDSI partners and representatives from industry and other research institutions.
The photo gallery shows memorable moments of our opening ceremony.
The Grand Opening of our Konrad Zuse School in Reliable AI was a great success. Welcome addresses by TUM Senior Vice President Prof. Dr. Gerhard Kramer, LMU Vice President Prof. Dr. Francesca Biagini and DAAD Secretary General Dr. Kai Sicks inaugurated the event. Afterward, State Minister Markus Blume honored us with the keynote address. Our directors Prof. Dr. Stephan Günnemann and Prof. Dr. Gitta Kutyniok introduced relAI to our guests from politics, science, and industry. The representatives of relAI academic, industry partners, and fellows Prof. Dr. Phillip Grohs (University of Vienna), Prof. Dr. Fabian Theis (TUM), Dr. Peter Lehnert (BMW), and Prof. Dr. Frauke Kreuter (LMU) presented our four research Focus Areas "Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations", "Medicine and Healthcare", "Robotics and Interacting Systems", and "Algorithmic Decision Making".
The celebration concluded with a reception combined with a poster session, where our students showed their research projects. A big thank you to everyone who contributed to presenting relAI and to everyone who joined us to celebrate the first successful steps of our school.
We are proud that our network is constantly growing and welcome the industry partners Infineon and Volkswagen into the relAI family!
One of relAI’s main objectives is to transfer the research results in reliable AI technology to industry. The partnership of relAI with industry not only ensures this transferability, but also contributes to the education of future experts in reliable AI, dedicated to guaranteeing the safety, security, and privacy-preservation in AI-based applications in domains such as autonomous driving (Volkswagen) and AI-based semiconductor solutions (Infineon).
This partnership is mutually beneficial to both, our students and our industry partners: The students have the opportunity to work with renowned companies to gain practical knowledge during projects, workshops and internships.Our partners get to work with talented young scientists from all over the world, with cutting-edge expertise in reliability.
relAI is happy to welcome five new relAI fellows from TUM, LMU and the research center Helmholtz AI.
The expertise of the new fellows on reliability AI will strengthen the relAI research and education, particularly on the Mathematical and Algorithmic Foundations relAI Focus area. New fellow Prof. Dr. Daniel Cremers (TUM) is specialised in computer vision and has worked in the AI field for many years, covering aspects of reliable AI. Prof. Dr. Reinhard Heckel (TUM) is interested in developing methods that are robust to worst case perturbation and most importantly to distribution shifts, an integral aspect of reliable AI. Prof. Dr. Johannes Maly (LMU) ´s research is naturally aligned with the goals of relAI. It focuses on understanding how to leverage intrinsic model or data structure and how the loss of information caused by digital processing (quantization) affects theoretical results. LMU fellow Prof. Christoph Kern works at the intersection of statistics, (computational) social science, and data science. His research goals overlap considerably with the research areas and themes of relAI. The research of Dr. Vincent Fortuin (Helmholtz AI) on uncertainty quantification with Bayesian methods also fits perfectly within relAI, especially with the central theme of safety. The contribution of the new relAI fellows to research support, seminars, and lectures will enrich the relAI curriculum and advance the theoretical research of the relAI field.