AI center successfully launched with kickoff at Leipzig University
On Nov. 27th, 2019 the kickoff of the new AI center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig took place in the full Felix Klein lecture room in the Paulinum of the University of Leipzig with the participation of State Minister Dr. Eva-Maria Stange, the Rector of the University of Leipzig Prof. Beate Schücking and the Rector of the TU Dresden Prof. Hans Müller-Steinhagen. ScaDS.AI (Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence) Dresden/Leipzig is one of the six centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI) funded within the AI Strategy of the Federal Government. The center, which is coordinated by professors Erhard Rahm (University of Leipzig) and Wolfgang E. Nagel (TU Dresden), builds on the successful Big Data competence center ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig, which was founded in 2014.
In ScaDS.AI, both Big Data and AI methods will be researched and transferred into scientific and economic applications, making ScaDS.AI also a research and transfer center for data science. The funding for ScaDS and its extension to ScaDS.AI will initially be provided by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) until 2022 with a volume of approx. 12 million euros. State Minister Stange, however, promised in her welcoming address that the Free State of Saxony will substantially support the center and provide additional funding. It is planned to consolidate the center and to establish several new AI professorships at the universities of Leipzig and Dresden. At the kickoff event, Prof. Rahm presented the planned work and the structure of the new AI center, in which 10 new principal investigators have been integrated. In further lectures, the planned work on topics such as machine learning, knowledge graphs, trustworthy AI, scalable AI and advanced AI applications was presented. A poster exhibition rounded off the event.
from left: Rector Prof. Dr. Schücking, Rector Prof. Dr. Müller-Steinhagen, State Minister Dr. Stange, Prof. Dr. Erhard Rahm, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel, Vice Rector Prof. Lenk