21 June 2024

A week in the name of AI

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The grand opening ceremony of the young ELLIS Institute Tübingen is attracting many special guests this week. The celebration spans four exciting days, culminating in a grand finale on Friday, held as part of the Cyber Valley Days. The event starts with a scientific workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday: Colleagues from the Canadian Institute For AI Research (CIFAR) came to Tübingen along with renowned scientists. Some of the guests will speak not only during the workshop but also in honour of the institute during the scientific symposium on Thursday.

True to the spirit of science, the event starts with a scientific symposium, with speakers who had already arrived for the workshop in the previous days. Among the speakers are Turing Award winner Prof. Dr. Yann LeCun, as well as Prof. Dr. Max Welling (CuspAI & University of Amsterdam), Prof. Dr. Sepp Hochreiter (ETH), Dr. Léon Bottou (Meta), and the Scientific Director of the ELLIS Institute Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schölkopf. At the subsequent opening ceremony, Ministerial Director Dr. Hans Reiter, Prof. Dr. Matthias Bethge (Tübingen AI Center), Prof. Dr. Peter Gratwohl (University of Tübingen), and the Mayor of Tübingen Boris Palmer honour the forward-looking institute.

For the grand finale during the Cyber Valley Days on Friday, guests closely associated with the ELLIS Institute enrich the celebratory event. Minister of Science Petra Olschowski, Dr. h.c. Hans-Werner Hector and Uwe Bleich from the Hector Foundation, as well as Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer, President of the Max Planck Society, and Dr. Anna Christmann from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, are present. At the end of the program, the symbolic button is pushed – thus officially opening the ELLIS Institute as the first of its kind in the world.

The ELLIS Institute Tübingen is part of the large ELLIS network, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. Since beginning operations, the young institute under the leadership of Scientific Director Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schölkopf and CEO Volker Maria Geiss has already successfully recruited five more renowned scientists. Dr. Wieland Brendel leads the Robust Machine Learning group, Dr. Jonas Geiping works in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems on Safety- and Efficiency-aligned Learning, Dr. Antonio Orvieto works on Deep Models and Optimization, and Dr. Celestine Mendler-Dünner leads the Algorithms and Society group. The newest PI, Prof. Dr. Frank Hutter, leads the ELLIS Unit Freiburg, his focus is Automated Machine Learning and he is the founder of the AutoML conference.

The ELLIS Institute benefits from the generous support of the Hector Foundation II as well as the state of Baden-Württemberg and aims to become a beacon of AI research for Europe. As part of the ELLIS Society, the institute will support groundbreaking research and provide its researchers with the best possible conditions for this. The ELLIS Institute will continue to recruit and promote promising scientists to make Europe stand out in the field of AI.

About the ELLIS Institute Tübingen

The ELLIS Institute Tübingen aims to gather the most creative minds to conduct excellent fundamental research in the field of artificial intelligence. As the world's first ELLIS Institute, it is developing into a recognized centre for experts and research, providing state-of-the-art workplaces and very good conditions for conducting research. The institute emerged from the ELLIS network, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), which is building a Europe-wide network for research in the field of machine learning.

German Press Release

Find the corresponding German text here.